


heart in a headlock

by andromeda3116



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-09-11 14:32:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 52,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8987779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andromeda3116/pseuds/andromeda3116
Summary: They say that, when in doubt, you should always choose to live, but, as Jyn is learning, it's much harder to live for a cause than to die for one. On the other hand, if you've got enough fire, you can burn anything, even the Empire. Even your own demons.[Rogue One survives Scarif, limps to Tatooine, and meets A New Hope.]





	1. heart in a headlock

**Author's Note:**

> so, i'm reading the novelization and it's at the climax and it's bodhi, and he's thinking about, now that he's gotten the message out to the alliance, that all he has left to do is take the ship and go up to the catwalk on the citadel and save cassian and jyn, but then of course the grenade. but i'm like "well if you're going to crack open that window then i'm gonna jump my happy little ass right through it" and so this story started. i don't really intend for it to be super-long but at the same time, you know, i said that about "such selfish prayers" and then i wrote a nearly 50k fic, so.

you say too late to start, with your _heart in a headlock  
_ you know you're better than this.

.

.

Jyn heard a story once, many years ago now -- the storyteller’s identity lost to the depths of memory -- of a great queen of a great empire, on her deathbed, croaking to her servants, _All my possessions for a moment of time_. The moral of the story, she recalls being told, is that no amount of things can buy even another second of life. 

In this moment, with the memory of the space station eclipsing the sun burning in her mind, and Cassian’s faltering breath both too close and not close enough, she thinks the old queen had a much different, much simpler motive:

 _I would give up everything I have ever had to feel something_ \-- anything, any of the myriad emotions, good and bad, any of the storms or the summer breezes or the winter freezes, the loves and the losses and the bitter betrayals and all the mornings she’s woken up alone and all the mornings she’s left someone behind sleeping, the pain and the joy and the heartbreak and the rapture -- _to have any one of these sensations back in my hands, for just one more moment_.

All she feels right now is exhausted, drained. It’s not a good way to die.

She decides to make for the lift, for the ground, if for no other reason than to feel steady earth under her feet for one last time.

“Come on,” she mutters under her breath, and Cassian -- bewildering Cassian, the captain who betrayed her but at the same time defied orders to _not_ betray her, the man who believed in her when he had no decent reason to do so, who came here on the faith that Galen Erso had not lied -- is standing beside her dying and yet rallying his strength anyway to follow her.

 _At least_ , she thinks in a faroff sort of way, _I’m not going to die alone_.

It’s worth something to her, here now at the bottom of things.

But there’s another noise, a closer noise, before they reach the lift, and there’s a ship -- their ship -- with her cargo bay wide open, beckoning, and it’s a long-shot chance but it’s the only one they’ve got so they half-jump, half-fall into her and hit the floor rolling.

It’s Bodhi, come back for them with an empty ship.

Jyn jams a fist into the console to close the cargo door, and wonders, with no small amount of hysteria, if this means that the universe expects her to hold up her end of the bargain.

.

“Chirrut?” she asks Bodhi, while Cassian sinks, wincing, into the co-pilot’s seat. He had refused to stay in the cargo bay, and she honestly can’t say she blames him; it’s haunted down there, with the echoes of all the people who came here with them and who they’re leaving behind. “Baze?”

Bodhi shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he replies, hands shaking on the controls as they escape the atmosphere. “But I saw an explosion from that way. I chanced a fly-by but I didn’t see anyone moving.”

Even if they _were_ alive, she thinks, as the atmosphere behind them scorches burning white, they aren’t anymore.

 _We are the only survivors of Scarif_ , she thinks. Of the whole planet, really, since even this small display of the weapon’s power is enough to wipe a world clean of life.

“But we succeeded,” Cassian says, voice strained like he’s holding back a cough, and then sighs, leaning back into the seat. She wonders if he believes it.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Bodhi snaps, reaching out with a semi-free hand to smack him on the arm. “Don’t fall asleep, you can’t fall asleep. Jyn, tell him not to go to sleep.”

“You probably have a concussion,” she agrees, nudging him. He cringes, so she nudges him again, harder. “You can’t sleep until we get you some kind of help. Speaking of…” she trails off, glancing at Bodhi. There’s no way they’ll get back to Yavin IV before Cassian crashes entirely, and while she does know basic first aid, he’s far beyond any kind of bandages and bacta patches she could throw at him. Most of it’s internal, anyway.

“I can get us to a few places nearby,” Bodhi mutters, and glances at a map. “But mostly they’re Imperial. Tatooine isn’t far, neither is Mon Gazza. I vote Mon Gazza, two trade runs pass through it, we’ll have better -- “

“Not Mon Gazza,” Cassian groans. They both look at him. “It’s nothing but spice and underground podracers.”

“Well…” Bodhi starts, but Jyn cuts him off.

“If it’s got podracing, it’s got medics.”

“Have you ever _seen_ a podrace?” Cassian counters weakly.

“You crash in a podrace, and there’s no medic in the _universe_ that can save you,” Bodhi chimes in. “Tatooine?”

“Tatooine is Hutt territory,” Jyn snaps. “They’re no friends of the Imperials, but they’d sell us out to them in seconds.”

“So we don’t tell them who we are,” Bodhi suggests, but seems to see something in her face. “I feel like you’ve met them before.”

She cringes, and changes the subject. “Ryloth?”

“I don’t know if we can make it to Ryloth…”

“It’s about as far away as Mon Gazza!”

“But there we’d have a better chance at getting off the planet,” Bodhi counters. “It would be worth it to try to make it there. Ryloth, not so much.”

“Well -- “ she starts, but then Cassian begins coughing, hard, and his hand comes away from his mouth with bright red blood. She freezes, jaw set. “Whatever inhabited planet is closest.”

“Tatooine it is, then.”

.

They land in Mos Espa, and even manage to get Cassian to what passes for a hospital in these parts, which Bodhi seems to find reassuring, but Jyn knows better -- this will put them deep in Jabba’s pockets, because he’s not stupid enough to hear about _rebel attack on Scarif_ and _bedraggled rebels drifting into his city with one half-dead man and two shellshocked soldiers_ , and not put the pieces together.

Their best bet would be to go to Jabba before he can come to them. That way they could at least make a show of offering him something in exchange for shelter, rather than being blackmailed outright.

But that would mean she’d have to leave the hospital, since she’s not sure that Bodhi -- terrified, soft-hearted, traumatized Bodhi -- is really the right person to send to Jabba, if for no other reason than she’s not sure she could be cruel enough to do it to him.

Jabba is not the sort of person you go up against without being very certain of just _what_ sort of person you're going up against.

She supposes, sitting in the hot “waiting room” while some droids work on Cassian, that they’ll just have to hope that Jabba has something brighter than them on his radar.

.

It takes a full day in a bacta tank before Cassian can even be taken to a room, and although Jyn is not exactly uninjured herself, she refuses the droids’ attempts to treat her while he’s in there -- bacta, in that quantity, isn’t cheap, and she already owed Jabba before coming here. Once the bill for Cassian’s treatment comes in, they’ll be in serious trouble.

“We may need to sell the ship,” she tells Bodhi, who gives her a look like she’s grown a second head.

“What? Why?"

“To pay for this,” she says under her breath. “We’ll need enough to pay for the medical bill, and it’s going to be steep,” she explains, and deftly ignores the fact that, if Jabba finds out who she is, it’s going to be significantly steeper. “The only thing we have that’s that valuable is the ship. If we sell it for enough, we can also buy passage back to base.”

“What if we just…” Bodhi whispers, then pauses as an aide passes them, “leave without paying?”

She cringes. If she hadn’t already done that to Jabba once -- or, well, if Kestrel Dawn hadn’t done that to Jabba once, in the event that had necessitated a new identity -- she would consider it. But she’d end up in carbonite for the rest of eternity if they got caught, and they probably would get caught. Jabba is very good at catching people who skipped out on their debts, and isn’t known for being forgiving to those who did it twice.

“It’s too dangerous,” she replies.

“And selling our only way out of here isn’t?”

“Mos Eisley isn’t far,” she counters. “It’s a major smuggler’s hub. We’ll be able to find passage.”

“We should ask Cassian,” Bodhi says, crossing his arms, and she purses her lips. It’s not that she’s against it -- Cassian is a spy, he probably knows how deep in sithspit they’ll be if they run afoul of Jabba the Hutt -- but she isn’t sure they’ve got the time. The aides are saying he’ll be out of the tank shortly, but he’ll need at least another day of rest before he can get back on his feet, and they’ll need to hit the ground running. She and Bodhi need to have everything already arranged by the time Cassian is ready to get out of the hospital bed.

“I don’t know if we’ve got that kind of time,” she mutters darkly, and Bodhi gives her the closest thing to a glare she thinks she’s ever seen on his face.

“What are you hiding? _Have_ you been here before?”

She clenches her jaw, but there’s nothing for it but the truth. “I have,” she admits. “If Jabba finds out I’m here, he’s going to shake me down until my teeth fall out. We need to get in and out of here as fast as possible, and if we can do it without making any fuss, all the better.”

“How much do you owe him?”

“That’s not important,” she answers, because the truth is that she isn’t sure. It was a few years ago, and Jabba is absolutely the sort to charge interest when his black little heart wills it.

“ _How_ is it not important?” Bodhi hisses, aghast.

“It’s a lot, all right?” she snaps back. “I was _seventeen_ , I wasn’t exactly the galaxy’s best smuggler. But we’re here now,” she adds, crossing her arms and leaning against the uncomfortable metal seat, wishing distantly for a shower and wondering when she last ate real food. There had been protein bars in the ship’s med kit, so she isn’t actually starving to death, but only sort of wishing she was. “So we have to deal with what’s in front of us. Best-case scenario, we get out of here without Jabba finding out we were ever in this sector. But I don’t see a way to make that happen without a lot of credits.”

“We could steal?” Bodhi suggests, but he doesn’t sound very convinced. “I mean, if it turns out that it’s not _that_ expensive, we could always try to pick someone’s pockets.”

“I don’t think anybody on _Tatooine_ is going to have ten thousand credits in their back pocket,” she growls through clenched teeth.

“Selling our only way off of the planet, so that we can get off the planet without trouble, _doesn’t_ sound like a good idea to _me_ ,” he replies sullenly.

“Well, come up with a better one in the next six hours and we’ll talk,” she snaps. He’s tapping his feet with nervous energy, hands on his knees, and she thinks he’s probably wondering if he shouldn’t have just left them on the Citadel tower. The thought opens up a gaping maw in her mind, a black hole she’s been circling for the past day, that threatens to crush her whole.

She’s not going to think about Scarif, she tells herself. Not going to think about Chirrut and Baze, not going to think about Melshi and Tonc and all the others she’d given that rousing speech to, encouraging them to go out and die. Not going to think about Cassian hitting every support strut on the way down. Not going to think about Kay telling them to climb.

The problem is, if she’s not thinking about it, she’s got nothing else right now to think of.

Luckily, a droid comes in after only a few more minutes, and tells them that Cassian is in a room now, and they’re welcome to come in and visit him if they like. He’s still out, but should wake up before too long.

“You see, it wouldn’t take long for us to treat you, miss,” the droid continues, but Jyn waves it off. “You have significant bruising and you are limping, which is possibly indicative of broken bones and internal injuries. Please allow us to care for -- “

“I’m fine,” she grumbles, and they walk into the room. It’s not a private one -- there really aren’t private rooms in this sort of hospital, only a bunch of beds lining the walls -- but there are only a few other patients there, although they eye her with a curiosity that’s unsettling.

Because they recognize them as rebels, she wonders, or because they recognize her as Kestrel? Or maybe they don’t recognize them at all, but just wonder why they’re here.

The old paranoia, cultivated by nearly seven years on her own, wraps itself around her like a security blanket.

She’d almost, surrounded by people who would have her back and fight for and with her, people she could almost say she trusted, been able to cast it aside.

Oh well.

When they get to his bed, Cassian looks peaceful, even serene, like he’s having a good dream, and for a moment she envies him the sleep. But only for a moment; if there’s anyone in the galaxy who deserves a few hours of blissful sleep, it’s Cassian, who, to her, seems to be perpetually stressed out of his mind. He looks younger like this, too, maybe only a couple of years older than her, and she takes his hand without thinking.

It’s only just settling in that they’re really alive -- after everything, after the Citadel, after the Death Star’s appearance -- they are here and alive and breathing. She’d been so certain they were going to die, and she’d been so desperate to feel anything other than hollow, clawing fear squeezing her heart to dust, that she never even considered what might happen to them if they didn’t.

Where do they go from here? Back to Yavin IV? They ought to -- they should see the job through, make sure that the plans got delivered, make sure that Galen Erso really wasn’t lying -- but at the same time, she’d really just like to sit here for a few more days, sleeping as peacefully as Cassian is right now, dreaming happy dreams of better times.

( _And also_ , a small part of her thinks, _where do_ we -- _meaning Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor -- go from here?_ )

“So what are we going to do?” Bodhi asks, startling her out of her reverie, and she realizes that she’s been staring at the sleeping captain. “About payment?”

She clenches her jaw. “You already know what I think we need to do.”

“Yes, but that’s a terrible idea,” he hisses, worry making him sound nastier than he probably means.

“So come up with another one,” she replies wearily, sinking into the seat beside Cassian’s bed and finally releasing his hand. There probably isn’t a better plan to be had.

“We could bomb Jabba’s lair,” he suggests, and she raises an eyebrow.

“Do you have bombs?”

“We could _find_ bombs.”

“Do you know where Jabba’s lair is?”

“No, but you do, right?”

“Not really, no.” It’s sort of a lie -- she knows it’s in the Dune Sea somewhere, but camouflaged to blend into the sand, and she has no idea whatsoever how deep in it is. Short of carpet-bombing the entirety of the Dune Sea between here and Anchorhead, she can’t really see how they’d manage to destroy it.

“Oh.”

“Selling the ship is our safest option,” she sighs. “There are plenty of smugglers in Mos Eisley who will take us off the planet. Maybe not all the way back to base, but at least out of Hutt territory. We can make it work.”

“Could we at least negotiate that _before_ selling the ship?” Bodhi asks, taking his goggles off and nervously messing with them without any apparent purpose.

“One of us could run on ahead to Mos Eisley,” she says. “But they’re not going to let him leave until the bill is paid.”

“We could -- “ he starts, but then one of the human aides walks up.

“Miss Dawn?” the woman says, in a deceptively pleasant voice, and Jyn bites back a groan, considering whether or not it would be worth it to feign ignorance. Glancing up at the smiling attendant, she decides that it would probably just end with her frozen in carbonite. Not that that's an unlikely outcome at the moment anyway, but it's probably better not to push her luck at this point.

“Dawn?” Bodhi asks, and Jyn sighs.

“That’s me,” she replies.

“We need to discuss the subject of payment, Miss Dawn,” the attendant says, still in that light, pleasant voice. Jyn wonders whether or not she’s some kind of ridiculously human-looking droid.

“Of course we do,” she mutters, standing up and wincing at the pain in every muscle, reasserting itself now that she had almost let herself believe they’d get a chance to rest. The attendant raises an eyebrow at her wince.

“You should have let us treat you, Miss Dawn.”

“Thanks, but I’m already deep enough in Jabba’s debt,” she growls, glancing back at Bodhi and shrugging. He looks panicked, but it’s not like there’s anything she can do about it.

“Then how much damage could a few thousand more credits do?” the attendant asks cheerfully, and Jyn cringes.

“Was that supposed to be reassuring?” she asks, and the attendant laughs a bit as they step into a lift.

“No.”

.

She’s handcuffed and shuffled into a speeder that sets off at a breakneck pace into the Dune Sea, and wishes deeply that she didn’t know where it was taking her.

It’ll be a while, she thinks; she’s only been to Jabba’s palace once, and from another direction, but if her vague mental map of the planet is accurate (a big if, frankly), they’ve got most of a day of traveling ahead of them before they get to it. It would be prudent to sleep, except the hot air and the high speed is whipping sand in her face even as she raises her scarf to shield herself from the worst of it. It’s so bad that she wishes they’d thrown a bag over her head like Saw’s men did.

Even if she’d wanted to talk to any of these people, they wouldn’t hear her over the wind.

So she’s left to huddle, burrowed into her scarf like some small, frightened animal, and think.

The past week hasn’t been kind in many ways, but the one way -- the one single way that it _has_ been on her side -- is that she hasn’t had the time to stop and dwell on it. It’s been so chaotic, one crisis to another to another to what she had truly believed would be certain doom, that mourning the dead and processing the information she’s been bombarded with hasn’t even registered on her priorities.

 _Shavit_ , it’s only been a _week_. Less than, really -- a week ago today, she was waking up in an Imperial prison listening to her cellmate tell her that she was going to kill her.

Since that time, she’s found and lost and found a home, found and lost her surrogate father, found and lost her biological father, found and lost a surrogate family, gone through at least three near-death experiences that she can think of off the top of her head, narrowly escaped the Empire’s greatest weapon twice, and ended up here, on the godsforsaken rock of Tatooine, being shuttled to meet and explain herself to Jabba the damn Hutt.

It’s like every piece of bad karma she’s ever earned decided to catch up to her all at once.

(Or maybe not, she thinks again. At least she’s not alone anymore, in general if not in this specific instant.)

Jyn wonders if this is how the Force works: you spend half your life trying to escape its pull, only to have it wrench you violently back into its path the moment it gets a foothold in your life. She fingers her mother’s crystal at her neck, and wishes that she’d ever asked where it came from. Was her mother a Jedi, once upon a time? Or was she a guardian like Chirrut? She knows that Lyra had believed firmly, almost desperately, in the Force, had staked her whole life on it and ended up dead in a field anyway.

She realizes that she doesn’t even know if her mother ever got a funeral, or if her bones are still there on Lah’mu, waiting in vain for anyone to come back for her.

She clenches her jaw tightly to banish the thought, with little success.

The twin suns begin to set.

It’s going to be a long, long night.

.

The first thing Cassian becomes aware of is the sound of an incessant tapping.

The second is that he feels absolutely no pain, which has become something of an anomaly in his life.

The third is that he’s laying in a bed in a hot, dry room.

He tries, with limited success, to sit up, and someone’s hands help him. He blinks in the white, artificial light and looks up into the anxious eyes of Bodhi Rook.

“Hi,” Bodhi says, and something in his face tells Cassian that there is very bad news hiding there.

“Where are we?” he asks, instead of going straight for the bad.

“Tatooine,” Bodhi replies, which is confusing, since the last thing Cassian remembers talking about is Mon Gazza. “It was the closest inhabited planet we could get to. You’ve been in a bacta tank for most of a day, but you’re better now, so that’s good.”

He runs a hand over his face and glances around. “Where is Jyn?” he asks, and Bodhi’s wince tells him that that is, most likely, the Bad News. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

“Er…” Bodhi starts, cringing. “Probably? Apparently she owed Jabba the Hutt a lot of money, she didn’t tell me how much, but they came and took her away to discuss payment, it sounded bad.”

He blinks. _Owed Jabba the Hutt a lot of money_ is one of those phrases that is usually only found in obituaries.

“What’s our plan?” he asks, but doubts that Bodhi has an answer. He’s a good guy, a solid ally, and exceptionally smart in his own sphere, but Bodhi runs on a rabbit’s sort of fear, the kind that drives a person to do great things because they’re kriffing _terrified_ of what will happen if they stop running. It’s a fear that makes a man brave, but only rarely creative. Most likely, he was expecting to hash out a plan with Cassian, because hell if _he_ knows how to deal with Jabba the Hutt.

(Cassian _does_ know how to deal with Jabba the Hutt, and that’s “don’t.”)

“Well, Jyn’s original plan was to sell the ship and use the money to pay off the hospital and buy us passage out of here,” Bodhi answers, as if it’s an actual answer. “But that was before they identified her. She was hoping we could get out of here without coming up on his radar, but we didn’t. Obviously.” He hesitates, then plunges forward. “I’ve been trying to come up with something, but I can’t think of anything. We’ve got no weapons on us, no money, nothing to sell except the ship or our own bodies and I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound like a good idea to _me_ , we don’t really know the city unless you know the city, do you know the city?”

Cassian takes a deep breath, recalling how Bodhi babbled back on Eadu -- he’s nervous, and that’s how he responds to anxiety. He wonders what, exactly, he’s most nervous about. There are a lot of possibilities. “What city are we in?” he asks, running a hand over his face. “Mos Eisley?”

“Mos Espa.”

He lets out the breath. Hell if he knows his way around Mos Espa. It used to be a slaving city, and some people claimed it still was, albeit underground, and was firmly in Hutt territory, so he’s never come anywhere near the place.

“Never been here before.”

Bodhi slumps. “Me neither. I’ve never even been on this planet before.”

He clenches a fist under the sheet. If this hospital is run by Jabba’s people -- and it probably is -- then they’re _not_ getting out of here without paying, or at least he isn’t. Maybe he can send Bodhi to go find credits, somewhere, but where? Tatooine isn’t exactly the richest place in the galaxy, and trying to steal from some of its richer wayfarers is a great way to get a blaster bolt to the eye. Selling the ship really does seem to be the best option, but then how do they get Jyn?

 _You could always just leave her_ , his self-preservation mutters, but he ignores it. He made that decision all the way back on Jedha, if he was ever going to leave her behind it would have been then: now he’s too deep in her thrall to ever just walk away.

Why the _hell_ did Jyn let them come to Tatooine if she owed Jabba money?

He asks Bodhi as much, but gets a pained grimace in response. “You were in bad shape,” he replies. “I don’t think we could have gotten you anywhere safer.”

“Christophsus is closer,” Cassian snaps. “It’s right there _by_ Scarif.”

Bodhi shakes his head. “It’s firmly in Imperial territory, and we were already heading away from it. It was Tatooine or let you die.”

What he doesn’t say: _And so Jyn made the objectively wrong decision for herself, because it would save your life_.

He doesn’t recall her being particularly badly injured -- nothing that wouldn’t heal on its own, at any rate -- so it was just Cassian’s life on the line.

And she’d decided that he was worth the risk.

“What about the Alliance?” he asks a bit desperately. “Can we contact them?”

“I tried that, sort of,” Bodhi answers, sighing. “I got a lot of Imperial chatter, they’re looking for some droids here. It’s not safe.”

“Droids?”

Bodhi nods. “A pair of droids. They didn’t say why.”

So the Empire is looking for a pair of droids on the same gods-damned rock that they fled to with the hope of saving Cassian’s own life; the thought enters his head like a knife to the back: _the plans for the Death Star might be with those droids_.

But why would they be here? Unless the Alliance ship carrying them had been captured, and somebody decided to send a copy off to the nearest inhabited planet, in the hopes that someone was there? Maybe they’d seen _Rogue One_ leave in this direction?

Something didn’t add up. But he couldn’t think of anything else a pair of droids might have that would lead the Empire to Tatooine.

“We’ll need to find those droids,” he says quietly, swinging his feet over the side of the bed to sit up fully. “After we find Jyn.”

“Right,” Bodhi replies, nodding. “But how?”

Cassian runs a hand through his hair. That’s the question, isn’t it?

.

The first sun is beginning to rise when they come up on Jabba’s lair, a building that looks like an old monastery out in the wastes of the desert, and Jyn startles out of the fugue state she’s been in for the past hour, staring at the floor of the speeder, too strung-out and anxious for sleep but too tired to think anymore.

One of Jabba’s aides jams her in the back with his blaster, forcing her to her feet and out of the speeder; she moves slowly and stiffly, more of a stagger than a walk, as they file into the building.

It’s strikingly cold in the monastery, and loud -- music is playing from some hall nearby, people are jabbering all around in languages she barely knows, and nobody pays them much attention at all as they filter through, even though they come with a hostage in handcuffs.

Then again, hostages in handcuffs are probably a common sight in this place.

Even though she knows what to expect, has met Jabba before, somehow she’s still unsettled when they walk into his throne room.

It’s just that he’s so _large_ , takes up space like a traumatic memory, shoving aside and poisoning everything around him with his existence, twisting the air he breathes into a knife.

He speaks in Huttese, but everyone who deals with Jabba learns very quickly how to understand Huttese.

“ _Kestrel Dawn_ ,” he says, and she thanks her lucky stars that he doesn’t appear to know her real name.

“Yep, that’s me,” she replies, in Common, because she’s a stubborn little bitch and it’s all she’s got to hold onto right now.

“ _I was surprised to hear you were back on my planet_ ,” he goes on, sliding forward like a snail. She wonders if he leaves a trail behind him, but makes no move to look. “ _You must have been desperate to save your… companion_.”

She flinches involuntarily at the word. “He was badly injured,” she answers. “Tatooine was the closest inhabited place.”

“ _Badly injured how?_ ” he asks, and she deliberately misunderstands him.

“Internal injuries, mostly,” she says flippantly. “Broken ribs, punctured lung, that sort of thing.”

“I wonder how he managed that,” Jabba’s aide says beside her, in a deceptively neutral voice. They know -- they all know -- that she and Cassian and Bodhi are rebels from Scarif, but damn if she’s going to just admit it to their smug faces.

“Got into a fight over a podrace in Mon Gazza,” she replies, shrugging. “We bet a lot of money, and lost.”

Jabba laughs, a terrible sound to hear and an even worse one to see, as it ripples over his entire body. “ _I wonder why you try to lie_ ,” he chortles, but doesn’t press her for details. “ _That’s not why I brought you here. You owe me a lot of money, Kestrel_ ,” he says, crossing his arms. “ _I want it back_.”

“Well, I haven’t got it right now,” she replies, because there’s really no point in trying to bluff about this one. “I can get it, but it’ll take time.”

“ _You’ve had five and a half years._ ”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t had a very steady job,” she snaps, and he grins.

“ _That’s not my concern. You will pay me_.”

“With what?” she snarls, already knowing what the answer will be: her service, for an indeterminate amount of time. She just hopes that, if she can’t talk her way out of this one, Bodhi and Cassian leave without her. They don’t deserve to be trapped on this dusty rock.

But Jabba surprises her.

“ _What is it you value most, Kestrel?_ ” he asks, and she freezes. It’s not like Jyn has ever kept much of value -- her blaster was probably the most valuable thing she had, but it’s long gone with the rest of Scarif. But still, she lands on an option.

“I have a ship,” she replies desperately, but Jabba shakes his head.

“He didn’t ask what the most _expensive_ thing you have is,” the aide hisses in her ear. “He asked what the most _valuable_ thing is. You’ve got to be taught a lesson, _Jyn Erso_ ,” he adds, and she forces herself not to flinch. Figures that Jabba would toy with her hope like this. It's a stark reminder of why she gave up on the emotion in the first place.

“ _You’ve got a kyber crystal_ ,” Jabba says, and she wonders darkly why he bothered to ask when he already knew what he wanted.

 _You’ve got to be taught a lesson_. Humiliation is the point.

It makes sense. To Jabba, ten or twenty thousand credits isn't all that much. It’s the principle of the thing, to lord over her that he can take whatever the hell he wants from her, that he has absolute power over her right now, and there's not a damned thing she can do about it. It's not about the money, and it never was. She humiliated him by escaping and then getting away with it for five and a half years; it's not a debt that can be paid with credits.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she growls, and the aide reaches out and, almost delicately, pulls her mother’s pendant out of her shirt. How the hell did he know about it? “It was a gift from my mother. It’s worthless.”

“In credits, perhaps,” the aide says. “A gift from your dead mother, which you still carry with you to this day, I imagine is very valuable to you.”

“ _You have a choice_ ,” Jabba says, eyes alight with a disturbing cheer. “ _You can give me the crystal, or you can come into my service until your debt is paid._ ”

It’ll take years, if not decades, of service to pay off that debt.

“There has to be something -- “ she starts, but Jabba cuts her off.

“ _If you don’t choose one of these_ ,” he says, almost lazily, “ _I’ll have your injured companion killed_.”

Cassian and Bodhi can probably handle themselves against whoever Jabba throws at them, assuming that Cassian is awake, and that they can find weapons, and that not every single person at the hospital is in Jabba’s pocket.

Her eyes land on the crystal, Lyra’s gift to her, Lyra’s faith, the last remnant she has of the last time she felt like she was safe and had a real home. It’s always stood for hope, to Jyn, been the one light in the darkness when she’s had nothing else to guide her -- she’s always had her mother’s gift, her mother’s faith, her mother’s love tied around her neck and resting against her heart. When Jyn has had nothing else, she has had her mother’s crystal.

 _It’s just a thing,_  she thinks. _It’s not worth more than a person. It’s not worth more than Cassian_.

But it’s her _mother_ , it’s everything her mother stood for and believed in and gave to her. Her mother, the last person who didn’t let her down.

(Cassian came up to the catwalk, bruised and broken, to help her when he had no reason at all to believe in her in the first place.)

_The strongest stars have hearts of Kyber._

_Trust in the Force._  

“All right,” she whispers, unable to speak any louder. “It’s yours. Let us go.”

Jabba grins, the aide snaps the necklace from her neck and walks away with it, and another aide shoves her out of the throne room and out of Jabba’s palace and back onto the speeder.

She feels blinded, even as the dawn-light lands on her.


	2. an ocean in the way

‘cause you’re a hard soul to save, with _an ocean in the way_  
but I’ll get around it, I’ll get around it

.

.

In the end, Cassian decides that they’re going to have to wait for him to regain his strength -- not a decision he came to lightly, and in fact only relented after three painfully-failed attempts to stand on his own -- so they may as well take things as they come until then.

“Miss Dawn will be back soon,” an aide had said, and according to Bodhi that was Jyn, whatever fake name she'd given Jabba once-upon-a-time in a well-meaning attempt to protect her future self from this exact scenario. It's not comforting. He has no idea what state she’ll be in when she does return, if the aide is even telling the truth at all.

“What does Jabba do to people who owe him money?” Bodhi asks in a low voice, eyeing the aide. Cassian glares, at both nobody in particular and the universe as a whole.

“Depends,” he replies darkly. “I've heard he uses them as decorations, or else just throws them into a Sarlacc pit.”

“But why would they tell us that she'd be back soon if they were gonna do that?”

 _To stave off our murderous rage_ , he thinks, but doesn't say. “Is there anything she could have paid him off with?” he asks instead, and Bodhi shrugs.

“You think he'd accept the ship?”

He opens his mouth to respond, although he isn't sure exactly what he's going to say, but closes it again when the screaming starts from outside the door.

“ _Son of a bitch!_ ” a woman's voice is shouting, and both he and Bodhi jump up to go see what the fuss is, but only Bodhi actually makes it, cracking open the door and peering into the hall.

“It's Jyn!” he hisses, but anything else he starts to say is drowned out.

“You said the debt was paid!” Jyn screams, and the voice that responds is infuriatingly mild.

“No, we said _your_ debt was paid, Miss Erso. Did you think that would be sufficient to cover a hospital bill as well?”

“At least she's all right,” Bodhi mutters.

“Jabba said -- “ Jyn starts, but the other voice cuts her off.

“It's not my concern if you misunderstood the deal you made with Master Jabba.”

There's a long, tense pause, before Jyn responds in a voice too low for Cassian to understand. The other voice laughs.

“Nine thousand, four-hundred and seventy-two credits, Miss Erso,” it says, and both he and Bodhi cringe. Jyn mutters something else, but the other voice simply laughs again. “You came to us, Miss Erso. Perhaps you should have gotten a quote first. We will expect payment before you are all allowed to leave.”

Her footsteps come closer, stomping all the way, but before she comes into view, Bodhi addresses her.

“I take it we’re still on the hook for the hospital bill,” he says, _audibly_ wincing.

“Yeah, of course we’re still on the hook for the bloody hospital bill,” Jyn snaps, storming through the doorway. “Why would I even think -- Cassian!”

He makes a passable attempt to smile. “I'd say good afternoon,” he says, wincing in what he will, later, pretend was physical pain, “but it sounds like you've had a bad day.”

( _Wit_ , he thinks, _thy name is_ not _Cassian_.)

She heaves a sigh and walks over to sit in the chair Bodhi just vacated. “Understatement of the century,” she mutters, crossing her arms. “At least I think they'll let me leave to get the money. That's honestly more than I was expecting from them.”

“What’d you give them?” Bodhi asks, and she shakes her head a little, like it's nothing.

“Don't worry about it,” she replies, and he glances at Bodhi, who looks as convinced as Cassian feels. “The important thing is,” she goes on, a little louder, as though sensing their skepticism, “we've got to come up with nine and a half thousand credits before we can get out of this dust bowl.”

“Selling the ship is probably our best option,” Cassian says, running a hand through his hair, vaguely appalled at how greasy it feels; but then, it's been nearly three days since he's had a proper shower, and he spent one of those immersed in literal slime, so it's probably to be expected. It's not the most disgusting he's ever been, but not far from it, either.

“Bodhi and I can work that out,” Jyn says, but he gives her a critical look, which seems to offend her. “What?”

“When did you last sleep?” he asks, and her face stills in a way that's disconcerting. “Or eat, for that matter?”

Jyn hesitates for a moment, then gives a small, forced snicker. “Thanks, mother,” she laughs, and he wonders if she thinks she sounds convincing.

“I'm serious,” he says. “The droids kept saying you wouldn't let them treat you. Why not?”

“We’re already in deep enough sithspit,” she replies defiantly, and he knows that -- no matter what he says, does, or argues -- she is never going to relent on this one. Short of tying her to the next bed over and force-feeding her a sedative, there is no way to get her to let them treat her.

“Seriously?” Bodhi mutters, crossing his arms. “How much more could it possibly cost?”

“I didn't see you lining up for a bed either, _friend_ ,” she snaps, shooting an undeserved glare at the pilot. Cassian makes a hand motion to Bodhi from behind her back, _just let it go for now_.

“Look, I can sell the ship on my own,” Bodhi says, and he's probably telling the truth, but they'll also probably get more with Jyn to make any hagglers rethink their priorities. “You look like you haven't slept in a week. Let me handle it.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but Cassian, seeing his chance, steps in. “Don't take less than twenty thousand,” he says hurriedly. “Start with at least thirty.”

Bodhi raises an eyebrow. “It's _easily_ worth fifty.”

“Yes, but you won't get anyone on Tatooine to buy _anything_ for fifty thousand credits,” he counters, and Bodhi makes a face.

“I'll go with you,” Jyn says, standing, and she almost manages to hide the way she wavers when she does. “I can be convincing.”

“Don't take this the wrong way,” Bodhi starts, glancing to him for support, “but I'm not sure you won't shoot anyone.”

“I don't just shoot people who annoy me,” she snaps.

Cassian has a choice: back Bodhi up in what will probably be a failed effort to make Jyn take a break, or back Jyn up against his better judgment to avoid becoming the target of her not-insignificant ire. He hesitates, thinking of the way she stilled and deflected in the face of his earlier concern, then decides.

“Jyn, you don't have to do everything yourself,” he says quietly, and she rounds on him, eyes flashing. “Bodhi can handle it. You need sleep more than we need a few extra credits.”

He almost says _you're not alone anymore_ , but catches himself. Jyn -- particularly a hungry, sleep-deprived, injured Jyn -- won't thank him for bringing that kind of thing to light. Abandonment has left deep scars on her, but she'd rather keep them hidden.

(He wonders if he's reading her or just projecting. Then again -- _I'm not used to people sticking around when things get bad_ \-- she probably thinks the only reason he and Bodhi are still here is because of his injuries. One good deed done by a near-stranger isn't enough to drown out a lifetime of being run out on.)

Her jaw clenches and unclenches a few times like she's arguing with herself.

“You can trust me, Jyn,” Bodhi says, and he almost sounds hurt.

“It's not -- “ she starts, then runs a hand through her hair and glares at it in a familiar way. “It's not that I don't trust you.”

“Then what is it?” Bodhi asks, arms crossed again.

She looks between the two of them, and they all know they've got her cornered. He feels a little bad about it.

“Look at it this way,” Cassian says, shifting uncomfortably in the bed. “It's boring here, and I need company, or else I'll start reprogramming one of those droids to get Kaytoo back.”

He says it like a joke, but he's seriously considering it. Somewhere on base, he has a hard drive with the droid’s data on it, all he would need to do is wipe one of them clean and somehow smuggle it out of the hospital. Maybe they can convince the aides to let a droid escort them into the city to get the money, then he can wipe it and they can get the hell out of here. They'd never be able to come back to this planet -- scratch that, sector -- but it's not like he'd planned to retire out here.

He pauses, mulls that over for a moment.

“Wait, I have an idea,” he starts, but Jyn shakes her head.

“We're not reprogramming one of their droids and skipping out on the bill,” she sighs, and he wonders when she learned to read minds, or if he really is just that predictable to her. Or maybe she's already considered it. “Jabba’s tracking me.”

“You think we can't lose a trail?” he asks incredulously.

“Wait, that actually was your idea?” Bodhi cuts in, confused. “That's… not a bad one.”

“Jabba hires dozens of bounty hunters. He _will_ catch up, he always does,” she says, sinking back into the chair. “I, for one, am not planning to spend the rest of my life as a carbonite wall hanging.”

“He didn't catch up to you,” Bodhi points out, and she buries her face in her palm.

“He also didn't have my real name back then. Or anything of mine he could use to track me with.”

He and Bodhi glance at each other, but he shakes his head slightly. _Don't push_ , he tries to say with his eyes, and either Bodhi reads it or just knows better, because he doesn't draw attention to her accidental hint.

Just what _did_ she give Jabba to pay off her debt?

“All right,” he says, a bit grudgingly and a bit hesitantly. “We’ll stick to the plan. We’ve pushed our luck more than enough for one week.”

“I’ll be back soon,” Bodhi says, nodding, and darts out of the room before Jyn can mount a counteroffensive. She doesn't raise her head.

He watches her for a moment, considering whether or not to speak, but decides on silence.

She almost looks like she's grieving.

.

Part of her thinks they should have gone with Cassian’s reprogramming idea -- in some ways, it would be safer, and would net them a new Kaytoo -- but all she can think of is, _what else would Jabba take from me?_

She's exhausted, in a way that runs all the way down into her marrow, and she knows that Cassian and Bodhi were right, she needs to rest and trust them, but --

But when she closes her eyes, all she can see is her mother taking off the necklace, her most prized possession, and putting it around Jyn’s neck. _Trust in the Force_ , she'd said.

Not _I love you_ or _goodbye_ \-- just _trust in the Force_.

Between Lyra and Chirrut, she's starting to think that the Force is what people get instead of peace. _Either_ the Force is on your side, _or_ your life story gets a happy ending.

It's not fair.

But then, what in her life has ever been fair? And whoever promised fairness in the first place?

“If I ask for a sedative,” Cassian starts, jolting her out of her head (out of Lah’mu, out of Scarif, out of Jedha) and back into the hospital ward, “I can give it to you. Probably won't cost much extra.”

He's watching her carefully. She wonders what he sees.

“I don't need a sedative,” she lies, and he raises an eyebrow skeptically, but leans back against the headboard without calling her on it.

“Offer’s open,” he says evenly, and a long silence falls, bearing down on her heavily.

The words spill out of her: “Why do you care if I sleep?”

He looks at her for a moment, then counters, “Why did you come to Tatooine when you owed Jabba money?”

“You were _dying_ ,” she snaps, sleep deprivation making her irritable.

“So?”

“So?” she repeats, incredulous. His calm is infuriating to her at the moment, but she knows it's not rational, and it's not fair to take her rage at Jabba out on Cassian. It's just so hard to rein it in. “So I should have let you die to avoid paying a debt?”

“So I should just let you run yourself to death because you're too stubborn to sleep?”

She scowls. “It's not the same thing at all,” she grumbles, even though his point is made.

“You're not alone anymore, Jyn,” he says sharply. “I look out for my own.”

 _I'm always alone_ , she thinks, but catches herself. Bodhi had been really hurt by her not trusting him, not understanding how he hasn't earned her trust at this point -- not understanding that it's not about him, it's not about what he does or doesn't do, it's -- it's --

It's that everyone she's trusted to have her back has left her alone, sooner or later. It took Galen eight years, it took Saw eight years, it’s taken less and less with every ally since. She'll drive these two off eventually, too. 

Sooner or later, everyone finds something that's worth more to them than Jyn. 

(She still feels the crystal like it's a phantom limb, its weight around her neck heavier for its absence. She still catches herself trying to reach up and touch it, to ground herself with it.)

“Get some sleep,” Cassian says, softer, standing with apparent difficulty. She jumps up to help him and he startles her by pushing her onto the bed with more agility than his movements and injuries suggest he should be capable of, then takes the seat by the bed she just vacated. She glares. “See? One patient, one bed. No extra charges. Sleep, Jyn.”

The bed is still warm from his body heat. It's more comfortable than she expected it to be, or else she's much more tired than she's been willing to admit to herself, and the idea of sinking down and shutting down for a few lifetimes is tempting.

She doesn't want to give in; she doesn't want to get used to this.

But the exhaustion is overwhelming, and Cassian is giving her this look that tells her on no uncertain terms that if she tries to stand, he'll take drastic measures.

 _You can't get used to it_ , she tells herself as sleep begins to take hold, _but that's no reason not to enjoy it while it lasts._

.

He watches her; even in sleep, her fingers twitch toward her neck, like she's dreaming of being strangled, or perhaps trying to hold something she's lost.

He thinks he knows what she gave Jabba, the price she paid for his life.

He doesn't know what the crystal she wore around her neck is worth to her, but he thinks he knows her well enough by now to know that someone like Jyn would not keep something like that tied around her neck if it was just a pretty thing she'd bought in a market somewhere. She's been essentially homeless since she split with Saw’s faction, in and out of Imperial prisons, living alone -- possessions don't follow you when you live like that, not unless they're much more than a possession.

And it’s a kyber crystal, which is something that has gone sharply up in value in recent years, thanks to the Empire’s monopoly on the stock, so it's not unreasonable to assume that Jabba might have wanted it -- he can probably sell it for a hefty price on the black market.

Even for someone like Jyn, who is so used to losing things that she doesn't know how to hold them anymore, losing that one special item would be a heavy blow.

And yet she's here.

Here at the hospital, moving on, arguing with them and working with them and pretending that the price she paid Jabba isn't important.

She's weary, certainly, and hurting, both physically and otherwise, but she has a spine made of pure titanium, and is lit from within by a fire like a phoenix has, consuming them whole so they can keep coming back.

 _Force be with me_ , he thinks, but doesn't pursue the thought any further.

.

It takes several blocks before Bodhi will accept that Jyn did not, in fact, sneak out of the hospital to trail him. Luckily, on a planet like Tatooine, people nervously looking over their shoulders isn't exactly a strange sight.

He despises the place, and kind of wishes he'd agreed to go to Ryloth. The heat is relentless and choking, the citizens suspicious and often hostile, and the landscape an eye-bleeding orange. If it hadn't been a matter of someone else's life or death, he wouldn't be caught dead in this hellhole.

He's still fuming, just a little bit, that Jyn didn't think he could handle selling a ship.

Granted, he knows nothing about Tatooine except what he has seen of it since landing, but as an Imperial pilot, he learned a whole awful _lot_ about going to exciting places and meeting new people who wanted him dead, so in some ways this is the most familiar place he's been all week.

In fact, thinking of it that way, he's far more suited to this than she or Cassian would be -- Jyn gets nasty when someone gets confrontational with her and although she could probably win a fight, it would probably also end with multiple dead bodies; Cassian would just lie like a rug and, okay, probably get them a stupidly good deal, but it would be through subterfuge and unsettling tactics.

Bodhi, meanwhile, looks harmless and makes people think they can take advantage of him, which is where he wins.

(For a brief time in flight school, before word got around, he hustled the absolute _shavit_ out of the barracks at sabacc, netting himself over two thousand credits, because everyone just assumed that he was an easy mark.)

Feeling a bit bolder, or at least less sour, he goes into the nearest cantina.

It's slow at the moment, not yet late enough for any but the earliest drunks to be at the bar, so he immediately gets the barman’s attention.

“How can I help you?” the man asks, and seems easygoing enough, although his muscles threaten to break out of his shirt in what is most certainly a deliberate threat.

“Actually, I was wondering where in the area I might be able to sell a ship?” he asks, with what he hopes is a polite smile. The barman looks thoughtful for a moment.

“Depends on what you're selling it for,” he replies, eyes on the patch on his shoulder. “If it's junked, old Watto is who you wanna go to, but if it works, you might try Denis Vanda down the road a ways. He contracts with the Empire sometimes.”

The last is said in a deceptively, disconcertingly neutral tone. Maybe the bartender is wondering what an Imperial is doing selling a ship on Tatooine, maybe he recognizes Bodhi as a defector, maybe he thinks the flight suit is stolen, maybe he’s concerned about accidentally inviting trouble from the Empire. Bodhi tries to smile, and fails. Denis Vanda sounds promising, but talking to someone who contracts with the Empire, when he is an _exceptionally_ wanted man whom the Empire currently thinks is dead, seems like kind of a bad idea. On the other hand, a junk collector won’t pay him a fraction of what a running Imperial cargo ship is worth. He hesitates, sizing up the bartender.

“Is there anyone who might buy it who _doesn’t_ contract with the Empire?” he asks, hoping to imply _send me to a rebel faction_ while still skirting the line of plausible deniability. Not that such a thing will help him if the barman decides to have him arrested, but if the man gets offended, he can insist that no, he really just meant independent traders, obviously.

But it turns out that he’s in the right place, for a given definition of “right”.

“No rebel cells on Tatooine, sorry,” the bartender says, with a quirk of the lips that might be a sympathetic smile. “You’ll probably find some has-beens in the Eisley area, but people don’t come out here to fight the war.”

“You’re being kind of loud about that,” Bodhi replies, glancing anxiously at the handful of people at the bar. The bartender shrugs.

“Not a whole lot of Imperials on Tatooine, either,” he says evenly. “There are some independent traders, but they don’t stick around for long. If you’re feeling brave,” he goes on, eyeing Bodhi in a way that says they both know he does not ever feel brave, “you could try Jabba. He’ll buy just about anything, I’m sure he could use a ship if it works.”

The thought amuses him -- paying Jabba with Jabba’s own money -- but he has zero illusions about getting away with it.

“Thanks, but I’m not very brave,” he mutters, cringing. The bartender laughs. “Where could I find a trader?”

“Market’s that way,” the bartender replies, pointing vaguely east.

“Thanks,” he says, wishing he had enough credits to buy a drink, both as a show of gratitude for the information and because _wow_ he could use about five right about now, but all he has in his pockets is lint and sadness, so he’s left awkwardly shuffling out the door, wincing all the way.

Right, he thinks. The market.

.

It’s nearly midnight before Bodhi returns to the hospital, looking at Cassian with a weary half-smile and vaguely harried expression.

“How’d it go?” he asks, and Bodhi sighs.

“I got twenty-five for it,” he replies, which is honestly better than Cassian had hoped for. “Some smugglers decided it would be perfect for getting in and out of blockades in -- and I quote -- ‘the coming _shavitstorm_ those damn rebels have kicked up’ -- “ Cassian is torn between snickering at this and being kind of offended at the implication that the looming civil war is all their fault, “ -- so I refused to go lower than twenty-five. I also got them to throw in a bottle of Kowakian rum because I feel like we’ve earned that.”

“Well,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “You’re a _much_ better haggler than I thought you’d be.”

Bodhi snorts and takes a seat on the floor by the bed next to the one where Jyn is still passed out. “The trick is to get so beaten-down emotionally that you no longer care if they shoot you or not. I learned this the hard way.”

Cassian laughs, then regrets laughing because his ribs haven’t fully healed yet. Bodhi nods at Jyn.

“How long has she been out?”

“Since about a half-hour after you left,” he replies, and Bodhi whistles. “She’s barely moved. Did she sleep at all between leaving Scarif and Jabba’s people taking her away?”

“I don’t know,” Bodhi answers. “I did, so I had kind of assumed that she had. But probably not, come to think of it.”

Cassian glances back at her again, so still on the bed that he’s already checked several times to make sure she’s still breathing, and guesses that she did not.

She’s so damn reckless with her own well-being. It’ll be the death of him someday, likely soon.

“Where to from here?” Bodhi asks, and Cassian sighs.

“They said they’ll release me in the morning,” he replies, leaning back against the wall and sort of wishing he hadn’t given up the bed entirely. He can’t think of a good reason, right now, why they couldn’t have shared.  “Hopefully, Jyn will be awake by then,” he adds, and Bodhi raises an eyebrow as though to say _don’t hold your breath_.

“She kept saying we should go to Mos Eisley,” Bodhi muses. “And I didn’t find a whole lot of people here who seemed like they’d agree to take on passengers they couldn’t sell.”

“Hmm,” he mutters, thinking. “It’s several hundred kilometers away, we’d have to get transport and a map. Did you see anywhere that rented speeders, by chance?”

Bodhi seems to mull it over for a while, but then winces. “Not really, but I wasn’t looking. I did see someone with a bunch of dewbacks, though.”

Cassian blinks. “If we have to ride dewbacks from here to Mos Eisely, I’m going to kill someone.”

“They don’t move especially fast, no,” Bodhi says sagely. “It’s better than walking, at least.”

“Not much.”

“Do you think the workers here could point us toward something we can use?”

“Not for free,” he replies, crossing his arms. “Until we’re sure how much it’ll cost us to get to base, we need to be frugal with that money. We can find it on our own.” When Bodhi doesn’t look at all convinced, Cassian makes a face. “What?”

“I didn’t think you were much of an optimist,” he answers. “That’s all.”

“You think it’s optimistic to presume that three grown adults can find a place that rents speeders in the capital city of a planet?”

Bodhi just purses his lips and glances away in what he is starting to see is teasing. “In _this_ capital city of _this_ planet? Yes.”

“Don’t be an ass,” he says, but a little smile lights his face anyway. It feels good to talk like they’re normal people for once, who joke about petty things and make fun of each other, rather than everything being so oppressively serious. Bodhi holds up both hands in mocking, absolutely-stone-faced supplication.

“You’re the captain, it’s your call.”

“You’re damn right I am,” he grumbles, but finds his gaze wandering to Jyn in spite of himself. He may be the ranking officer here -- the only officer here, really -- but they both know they’ll follow wherever she goes. She’s their beacon, their north star, her fire all that lights the path ahead of them.

“We should also find a shower at some point,” Bodhi chimes in, and Cassian glances at him. “Look, I’m not throwing stones, I’m in the same place, but we are all getting _ripe_.”

“You’ve already had some of that rum, haven’t you?”

“I have not, but thanks for doubting me. You’re a great friend. I’m glad we met.”

He rolls his eyes and settles in against the hard wall for what will certainly be an unpleasant night.

(Bodhi is right, though, he thinks, shifting uncomfortably.)

.

Jyn wakes up in the absolute dead of the night, to see Cassian asleep in the little chair and Bodhi curled up on the floor between her bed and the next one. She sits up, blinking in the dim light, and inadvertently wakes Cassian up, but then, he couldn’t have been sleeping very deeply anyway.

“You’re awake,” he says muzzily, and she runs a hand over her face.

“What time is it?”

Cassian shrugs, yawning and leaning forward. “Probably an hour or so before dawn.”

“Did Bodhi sell the ship?”

“Yes,” he replies with a nod. “For twenty-five thousand, and a bottle of rum.”

The implication -- _you should never have doubted him_ \-- lingers, and now, having slept for something in the realm of twelve solid hours, she feels bad about it. But he doesn’t point it out, and so she doesn’t bring it up. She’ll apologize to Bodhi when he’s awake.

“Rum?”

“Kowakian rum.”

She mulls that over for a moment. “Impressive.”

“I thought so,” he says. “They said they’d release me in the morning, so we can get out of here bright and early, and get to Mos Eisley.”

“Great,” she sighs, falling back on the bed and then wincing at herself. “There wouldn’t happen to be a shower somewhere nearby, would there?”

For some reason, this makes him laugh, which startles her; she likes his laugh, she realizes, the way his eyes crinkle and the weight seems to lift off his shoulders and float away. It’s the first time she’s seen him do it.

“Not that I know of, but we all _desperately_ need one,” he replies, snickering.

“Ah well,” she mutters. “How are we planning to get to Mos Eisley?”

“I was thinking we could rent a speeder or something. There must be someone in the city who does that.”

Jyn, whose luck seems to run inversely proportional to how much she needs it, is less certain of that panning out. “What if we can’t find a speeder?”

Cassian makes a face. “Bodhi mentioned dewbacks.”

“Please no.”

He smiles at her, a real smile, not the little half-ones he’s given her before, as if he didn’t feel like he was allowed to ever be happy about anything. She likes his smile, too.

“That’s what I said. We’ll find a speeder. If it comes to it, I can steal one.”

She almost says something about how she can steal one, too, but holds it back, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to her. It just seems like it would be saying she didn’t believe him, in some way -- it just doesn’t feel like the right thing. But she doesn’t have much of anything else to say. 

Without thinking, her hand starts to drift to her neck, to touch her mother’s crystal, and it lands on her shoulders all over again that it’s gone now. She puts her hand back down and glances away, and if he notices -- there’s no _possible_ way he didn’t notice -- he doesn’t comment on it.

“Sounds like a plan,” she says instead, with an attempt at a smile.

He’s watching her carefully, as though seeing straight through her skin and right down into her soul, but all he does is nod.

.

After Cassian is discharged -- with insistence that he “take it easy” and “not put too much strain on his ribs”, which he appears to dismiss entirely --  they make their way out of the hospital and into the streets of Mos Espa.

Jyn hates Mos Espa, and always has. Something about the fact that it’s a nexus of the now-underground slave trade, that it was built by slaves and half its economy still runs on the buying and selling of _people_ \-- it leaves a nasty taste in her mouth.

But at least they won’t be here long.

Contrary to her (and, judging by the look on his face, Bodhi’s) expectations, Cassian does manage to find someone willing to rent them a speeder for a semi-reasonable price, and it’s only halfway to noon before they’re on their way to Mos Eisley.

Even in a speeder, the trip will take hours, and she finds herself drifting to sleep as Bodhi drives them, her head falling almost-unwillingly onto Cassian’s shoulder. He glances at her, but makes no move to push her away, which she’s grateful for.

They have to get back to base. They have to see the job through to the end. They have to make sure that her father wasn’t lying, they have to see the Death Star destroyed, and, in a farther-off goal, they have to see the Empire destroyed. She can’t truly rest without those things; even if she’d died on Scarif, she thinks she would have been a restless ghost, never satisfied with never seeing the fruits of all their labors. She would have had to know how the story ends, one way or another.

She wonders, distantly, as the motion of the speeder lulls her into a stupor, if Baze and Chirrut are still following them in spirit, watching and waiting to see what they accomplish.

 _We won’t let you down_ , she thinks, and pictures Chirrut smiling at her so clearly it’s almost as though he’s sitting next to them.

.

Cassian stays very, very still as Jyn dozes on his shoulder, and tries not to do anything that might disturb her. It’s not just that she could probably use the rest, even after sleeping through most of yesterday, and it’s not just that he’s half-falling asleep himself in the humming of the speeder and white noise of air rushing around them, but he refuses to think too much about it.

What he knows is this: she is asleep, curled up against him like a cat, and he doesn’t want her to move.

Anything beyond that... if there is a _later_ to be had, a future where things calm down and they can stop running and stop fighting and stop suffering, he can deal with it then. Now is not the time. It never has been.

She sleeps for most of the trip to Mos Eisley, waking up only when they slow down as they come up to the city late in the afternoon. There are stormtroopers everywhere; Bodhi has shed his jacket with the Imperial symbol on it, but otherwise, if these troopers have their descriptions...

Jyn looks up at him, wide-eyed and startled, and it occurs to him that they forgot to tell her about the droids that the Imperials are searching for.

“They’re not looking for us,” he murmurs, and hopes that it’s true, that nobody saw them flee Scarif, that the Empire believes them dead in the Death Star’s blast. She doesn’t look comforted, her hand clutching his arm so tightly that he’s certain it will bruise, but the stormtroopers just glance over their speeder, see no droids, and let them pass without a word.

“Why did they let us pass?” she hisses, and he leans in.

“They’re looking for a pair of droids,” he replies, suddenly glad that she vetoed his idea with the medical droid -- even that little bit of extra scrutiny probably would have gotten them captured.

“What?” she asks. “Why?”

He hesitates, wondering whether or not he should tell her his suspicions about the plans. “I’m not sure,” he admits finally. She looks mistrustful, and he realizes his mistake as she turns away from him and leaves him cold, even in the desert heat.

Jyn can tell when she’s being lied to, or something is being hidden from her, and she will inevitably jump to the worst conclusion -- she won’t think that he’s hedging his bets against wasting their time chasing after a couple of worthless droids, she’ll think he doesn’t trust her with the information. Saw Gerrara raised her, after all. Paranoia comes as naturally to her as breathing.

He hears her asking Bodhi about the droids.

“An astromech and a protocol droid,” Bodhi replies, glancing back at them and pulling the speeder in to park. “Nothing about models, at least not that I caught.”

“Anything about why?” she asks, and he glances back again, this time to Cassian, before shaking his head.

“Not a word.”

“So what do we think?”

Bodhi hesitates, busying himself by getting out of the speeder and stuffing his jacket into the bag, and it hits him.

They’re all thinking it, he realizes. They have all come to the same conclusion, but none of them want to be the first to say aloud that the Alliance may have lost the plans they nearly died to acquire, that Baze and Chirrut and Melshi and Tonc and all of the others _did_ die for -- none of them want to make it real.

He sighs and joins the two of them on the other side of the speeder, and says, in a low voice, “My theory is, the plans are with the droids,” and Jyn doesn’t look at him, but her hand clenches into a fist. Bodhi lets out a heavy breath.

“Why would the Alliance send a pair of droids with the plans to Tatooine?” Jyn hisses, voice taut with frustration.

“Maybe they saw us leave in this direction?” Bodhi offers, but Cassian shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he says, “but I can’t think of anything else a pair of droids would have that the Empire would care at all about.”

“So, now we have to find a couple of droids,” Jyn grumbles, tugging her bag out of the speeder with more force than is necessary. “That’s just -- that’s just great.”

He clenches his jaw, looking around the city, if it can really be called that. There are droids all over the place, and none of them stand out as familiar -- but then, there were droids all over the Alliance, too, and it wasn’t like he knew all, or even half, of them.

There are sentients everywhere, too -- a pair of twi'leks, an old man in brown and a blond teenager, a pack of tusken raiders, a knot of aqualish, more stormtroopers, a woman with a long braid and a knife in her belt -- all sorts come to Mos Eisley. Finding two random, nondescript droids here will be like finding a needle in a stack of needles.

He almost wants to just say -- _oh, screw this. The Alliance surely has some kind of extraction planned for the droids, if they were in fact sent by the Alliance, and they all think the three of us are dead anyway, so why don’t we all just buy passage to some green planet somewhere far away and live out our lives in some godsdamned peace and quiet for once?_ \-- but Jyn won’t go, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, anyway.

“Well,” Bodhi starts, wringing his hands. “The Force is with us, right? It’ll help us find them.”

The old man in brown looks around as though he heard him, and Cassian’s eyes narrow.

“Yeah,” Jyn mutters. “The Force will bring the two droids to us. That’s how it works.”

Her tone makes it impossible to know if she’s being sarcastic or serious.

He’s trying to convince himself that he’s imagining the old man’s scrutiny -- there’s a lot going on in the city, there’s no reason to assume that a random person who is much too far away to hear them is somehow eavesdropping on their conversation, or that he would have anything to take from it even if he was. But his eyes are piercing and searching.

“Come on,” he says under his breath, taking Jyn by the arm. “Let’s get out of the street.”

They duck into a cantina, and he swears he can feel the man’s eyes watching them every step of the way.


	3. working on white lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to mechanical-orange for beta-ing this for me! <3

steady walking, but bound to trip; should release, but just tighten my grip  
night time, sympathize, I’ve been _working on white lies_

.

.

The anger makes it all so much easier.

That's been the worst part of this whole Tatooine detour, to Jyn: being too exhausted to be angry anymore, and having nothing to fill that space up with except the sound of her mother's voice, the blood and sand of Scarif, the rains of Eadu, the deathly creak of Saw’s legs, Jedha burning. But the spark of anger -- at the Alliance, this time, for losing the plans, and a little bit at Cassian for… well, she'll say it has to do with trust -- lighting her insides up makes everything much more clear.

It also makes the pain fade; she’s starting to think that maybe she should have let them treat her leg, at least. The bacta patches have kept the wound she took on the catwalk in check, but the last time she changed the bandage it didn’t look good, and it’s starting to reassert itself. It’s been lingering in the back of her mind, so the anger flooding everything else out is a comfort.

“So where do we start?” Bodhi asks, and she purses her lips, looking around the dim room; Cassian, she notes, seems distracted, eyes on the door. “Just, walk up to someone and ask them to take us away? Because I can think of about eight ways that'll end with us poor. And also dead.”

He's not wrong.

“We can -- " she starts, but whatever Cassian is watching for seems to happen, because he's suddenly on high alert, hand going to his blaster. She looks around, but all she sees is an old man at the opposite end of the bar, trailed by a blond teenager who looks like he's never seen an alcoholic drink before. “What?” she asks, and his eyes narrow.

“That man is following us,” he murmurs.

She looks past him, wondering if they're looking at the same person, since the one she sees appears engrossed in conversation with a wookie.

“Who?” Bodhi asks. “In brown?”

Cassian nods. “He's been watching us since we got out of the speeder.”

Jyn cringes to herself; Saw would have had her head for missing that. She was too busy being upset with Cassian for trying to hide things from her to notice her surroundings.

 _That's what you get_ , she thinks, at the same time that a smaller part of her thinks, _that's why you have companions, so you don't have to be hyper-focused all the time_.

Like always, she ignores the second one.

“Are you sure?” Bodhi asks. “Maybe he was just surprised to see other humans.”

“He followed us in here,” Cassian replies, with some sharpness, but Bodhi just raises an eyebrow.

“Was there some other cantina he might have gone into?” he challenges, and that small part of her mutters, _well, he’s got a point,_ but they're at war. There's no room for giving strangers the benefit of the doubt.

“Better safe than sorry,” she says in a low voice, grabbing her bag and starting to make for the door, but then the man’s young companion gets shoved away from the bar by another patron, and the man pulls out a -- _lightsaber_ , her mother’s memory murmurs from the depths of time, holding an illegal holovid and showing her _Jedi of the Old Republic, they used lightsabers, Jyn, powered by crystals like mine_ \-- and ends the altercation before it can begin.

She freezes, feeling exposed as the man looks up, right at her.

She tries to recall if her mother ever named or described any of them, but if she did, Jyn never committed them to memory. Jedi in her imagination always wear her mother's face, anyway, or, lately, Chirrut’s.

“Ah,” the man says, walking up to her, looking for all the world like some kindly uncle. “You’d be Lyra’s daughter, then, wouldn't you?” he asks, and he must see her surprise because he gives her a small, bitter smile. “You favor her very much,” he adds, as though it's an explanation.

Several things happen at once: Cassian steps forward, blaster raised and body tense, ready to fight; the younger man asks, “Master, who are these people?”; Jyn asks, “How did you know my mother?”; Bodhi asks, “Were you following us?” in a strikingly hostile tone; and a blaster goes off in a booth nearby.

The last renders all the other questions and threats moot. The wookie makes a noise of what Jyn thinks is annoyance, and stalks over to the booth, where a man is kicking a dead Rodian out of the opposite seat.

“Walk with me,” the old man says, and Cassian looks at her with deeply mistrustful eyes, all but screaming _don't go with him._

And he doesn’t have to say it  -- they shouldn't trust this man, who may or may not have followed them, when they’re extremely wanted, and they still don’t know where the plans are, and they’re still banged-up -- but…

But -- he knew her mother.

And he's a Jedi.

“He's a Jedi,” she says in a low voice, and Cassian tilts his head in exasperated confusion. The man’s expression shifts slightly, as though it was something he didn't expect her to know.

“The Jedi were wiped out decades ago,” Cassian hisses, but she shakes her head.

“He's a Jedi,” she repeats, and the certainty of it is heavy in her mind, although there are plenty of other reasons he could have a lightsaber and wear a brown cloak -- the technology for making lightsabers isn't, to her knowledge, lost (and at any rate, they can be found on the black market for someone with specific tastes and money to burn), and clothing, as they've proved time and time again, doesn't mean anything. But she knows, deep in her heart where she hides her mother's ghost, that he is a Jedi.

“Very astute, Miss Erso,” the man says, nodding. “You may call me Ben.”

The name doesn't ring any bells in her memory. She notes that he isn't using her first name; she wonders if he doesn't know it, or if knew her mother before Jyn was born.

“How did you know my mother?” she asks, barely shy of open hostility, because these wounds run deep.

“All will be answered in time,” he says, sweeping past them as if it's all been decided. “Come, we need to arrange transport to Alderaan.”

“Alderaan?” she repeats, but he only nods, doesn't elaborate. “We’re not going to Alderaan.”

“I think you'll find that you are,” he counters without looking back, and the younger man winces.

“I'm sorry, he can be a bit…” he sighs, then holds out a hand to shake, which she doesn't take. “I'm Luke,” he says, “Luke Skywalker.”

That name _is_ vaguely familiar, although she can't place it.

“That's nice,” she says coldly, and follows the Jedi.

.

Cassian has often wanted to grab Jyn Erso by the shoulders and shake some kriffing _sense_ into her, but he's quite certain he's never felt the urge _this_ strongly before.

On the other hand, he follows her to the booth with the dead Rodian anyway. He tells himself that it's because someone has to watch her back -- she’s still limping, after all, and pale as a ghost, clearly vulnerable -- and knows good and damned well that he's lying to himself.

“Why are you going to Alderaan?” he hears Bodhi ask the kid, but Luke doesn't get a chance to reply before they're at the table with the wookie and a man a few years older than him.

“Han Solo,” the man says, indicating to himself. “I’m captain of the _Millennium Falcon._ Chewie here tells me you’re looking for passage to the Alderaan system?”

The name of the ship seems to mean something to Jyn, but she doesn’t comment on it.

“Yes, indeed,” the old man -- Ben, he’d called himself -- replies. “If it’s a fast ship.”

“Fast ship?” Han repeats, sounding offended. “You’ve never heard of the _Millennium Falcon?_ None of you?”

“I have,” Jyn says slowly, pointedly. “I heard her captain was named Calrissian.”

Han grins. “Not anymore, sweetheart,” he answers, and although Jyn doesn’t react to the pet name, Cassian’s blood pressure shoots up in a way that _cannot_ be a good sign for his health or, indeed, his future. To Ben and Luke, he boasts: “She’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. I’ve outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers, mind you, I’m talking about the big Corellian ships, now…” When this fails to get an impressed response, he goes on. “She’s fast enough for you. What’s the cargo?”

“Only passengers,” Ben replies. “Myself, the boy, the woman and her companions, and two droids. And no questions asked.”

Two droids. He glances at Jyn, although she doesn’t look at him.

“We never said we were going with you,” Jyn says sharply, but Ben doesn’t seem affected. Han glances between the two of them, seems to come to a decision regarding who is in charge of the conversation.

“What is this, some kind of local trouble?” Han suggests.

“Let’s just say that we’d like to avoid any Imperial entanglements,” Ben replies.

He catches Jyn’s eye, and she nods slightly. If she’s right -- if this man _is_ a Jedi -- then that makes sense. It sounds exactly like Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, to not only have a secret Jedi agent on a backwater planet, but to send the plans for the Death Star to him in the event of an emergency.

 _If_ Jyn is right about him being a Jedi. Cassian, who has on occasion come across a lightsaber in a market, does not believe that a weapon makes a man a Jedi, anymore than uniform makes Cassian an Imperial officer.

Not to mention that it would all be too neat for his life, things just falling into place so cleanly. He’s heard the Force works that way sometimes, puts things together when chance alone isn’t enough to make destiny happen like it’s supposed to, but he isn’t sure he believes it. If he has a destiny, he feels, it was probably to die on Scarif. They’re out into the black now, on borrowed time at the edge of the galaxy, cut loose and drifting in the wind.

He doesn’t really want to go back to Yavin IV, if he’s being honest with himself. He doesn’t want to look at the council, at the people who surveyed all that he and his had sacrificed for two decades, and decided to throw it all away and surrender in fear under the shadow of the Death Star. He isn’t sure he won’t start screaming at them -- _I’ve given you everything you’ve ever asked of me, and this is how you would have repaid me?_ \-- or else start shooting.

But he will follow where Jyn goes, because she stood in front of that damned council and demanded that they fight, because he has nothing left to believe in and hasn’t for a long time now, propelled solely by momentum and the weight of sunken costs, until she showed up and set his world on fire with his own half-empty words about hope.

“Well, that’s the real trick, isn’t it?” Han says, leaning back. “And it’s gonna cost you something extra. Five thousand a head, but I’ll throw in the droids for free. All up front.”

“ _Twenty-five thousand?_ ” Luke splutters, eyebrows raised. Cassian wonders at what point they all agreed to go to Alderaan with these two. Bodhi looks just as uncertain as he feels, but Jyn seems sure. “We could buy two new ships with that money!”

“Who’s gonna fly it, kid?” Han sneers. “You?”

“You bet I could,” Luke snaps. “I’m not such a bad pilot.”

“Bodhi could,” Cassian says easily, and everyone at the table glances at him. “He’s a former Imperial pilot.”

Bodhi looks like he would sort of like to hit Cassian at the moment, eyes desperately screaming _don’t drag me into this!_ while Jyn’s expression is unreadable.

“You’re a pilot?” Luke asks, looking at Bodhi eagerly, and then back to Ben. “See, we don’t need to put up with this guy.”

“Are you the one they’ve been talking about?” Han asks, in the air of one playing an idiot’s array. “The defector from Jedha? I think I’ve seen your face on their wanted holos.”

Bodhi winces. “Yes, that would be me.”

“What are you gonna do if you get boarded on your fancy new ship?”

 _Probably shoot all of the boarders_ , Cassian thinks, but sighs. Before he can respond, Jyn is speaking.

“Three per head,” she says. “That’s fifteen thousand, it’s more than enough to cover the cost of fuel, with extra for your profit and your trouble. Half now, half when we get to Alderaan.”

“I’ve got bills of my own to pay,” Han counters, but Jyn doesn’t flinch.

“We can pay two thousand,” Ben says. 

“Seventeen,” Jyn cuts in immediately. “Seventeen thousand credits to take a handful of nobodies to the Core.”

“But he’s not a nobody,” Han says, indicating to Bodhi, and Cassian seethes. “He’s a wanted man.”

“We don’t have to do this,” he hisses to Jyn, but Jyn is looking at Ben, and it occurs to him that maybe this runs deeper than the Force and Jedi and even the plans for the Death Star.

After all, Ben claims to have known Jyn’s mother, and from what he’s seen of her file, even _Jyn_ barely knew Jyn’s mother. Her loyalty to the cause has never exactly been unwavering, and although he doesn’t think she’ll abandon them to chase her mother’s ghost in an old man’s stories, he _does_ think she’ll change their plans around it. But he can’t pull her aside and discuss it with her right now.

“We need to stick to Ben,” she murmurs to him. “If they won’t join us to buy our own ship, then our hands are tied.”

“So convince him.”

“You met Chirrut, right? You don’t _convince_ Jedi to do anything they don’t want to do.”

“I haven’t seen -- " he starts, but then:

“They have no reason to look for me,” Bodhi says abruptly, startling both him and Jyn. His arms are crossed over his chest and his gaze is hard. He suddenly remembers that Bodhi sold their crappy Imperial cargo ship for twenty-five thousand credits yesterday, _and_ a bottle of rum. _The trick is to get so beaten-down emotionally that you no longer care if they shoot you or not,_ said like a joke, but Bodhi Rook is a man with nothing at all left in the galaxy to lose, and that’s the most dangerous kind of person who _can_ exist. “They think I’m dead on Scarif, they’ve discontinued my wanted status. Even if we get boarded and they think I look familiar, I know what codes they’ll need to hear to let us go. So if you want to get anything from us, you’d better accept seventeen, because we don’t need you as much as you need us.”

He can practically _hear_ everyone at the table re-evaluating their opinions of the quiet, scared-looking third member of their group.

It certainly seems to leave an impression on Luke and Han, the former looking at Ben like they should just up and leave the smuggler behind, and the latter looking like he’s just realized he made a _massive_ miscalculation.

Before Luke can start to argue for why they don’t need him at all, Han steps in for damage control.

“Seventeen will work,” he says, shrugging in a way that is trying desperately to be nonchalant. “But I’m taking a loss on this, you know.”

“We’ll bring our own food,” Jyn drawls, raising an eyebrow. “You won’t be out a damn thing.”

And, somehow, that’s that.

.

“Why are we doing this?” Bodhi asks, as they unload their (rented and never-to-be-returned) speeder. “Luke had a point, we don’t need him. We can buy our own ship and take them to Alderaan ourselves.”

“Why are we even going to Alderaan in the first place?” Cassian counters, scowling.

Jyn glares at her too-light pack and tries to ignore the dull pain -- steadily-increasing as the day has progressed -- in her leg. “I don’t know why they’re going to Alderaan, but Ben is on our side,” she replies. “He’s a Jedi, I think someone activated him after Jedha, or maybe Scarif. And we need Han because we need to stay under the Empire’s radar,” she continues, but the truth is something much, much simpler:

She is _exhausted_ \-- far, far too tired to deal with scrubbing a ship and working out an excuse for being in the Core in an unidentified vessel and all that comes with evading blockades and getting through space while carrying war-criminal faces -- and it’s much easier to just let a professional smuggler take the reins on this part. So much easier, in fact, that she’s willing to pay, as well as put up with the sleazy Han Solo in an apparently-stolen ship, to do it.

Distantly, she wonders if they’ll accept “the Force told me to hire Han Solo” as an excuse.

“Han has experience evading the Empire,” she adds, knowing how lame it sounds, but too tired and aching too badly to fight this battle anymore tonight. She catches something on Cassian’s face before turning away, something suspicious, but whatever he’s thinking, he doesn’t voice it.

“It _is_ easier,” he concedes, but doesn’t sound at all convinced. “That’s true.”

He’s watching her carefully, as if he’s waiting for her to do something. She chooses not to see it.

“We’ve spent the past week and a half fighting,” she grumbles, sorting through her bag with no purpose other than to distract herself from Cassian’s scrutiny. “I’m willing to pay credits we’ve got no other use for, to get a day _off_.”

Bodhi seems to agree with her, shrugging and looking critically at the droids with Ben and Luke -- an astromech and a fussy protocol droid, like the ones he mentioned hearing about in the Imperial chatter, it can’t be a coincidence -- but Cassian is still watching her.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks in a low voice, eyes locked on hers, and the lie tastes like ash on her tongue.

“I’m fine,” she says, matching his volume. “I’m just tired of doing it all alone.”

He accepts it, albeit warily. Come to think of it, he’s probably glad to hear her taking his words in the hospital to heart, about not being alone anymore, when all she really wants is to get him off her back. The realization wrenches at something in her gut.

 _Trust goes both ways_ , she’d told him, and he’d let the matter of her stealing his blaster drop.

She tells herself it’s not that big a deal, it’s just -- it’s just making things easier, if he knew that she was still hurt, he’d probably insist on taking her back to the hospital in Mos Espa, or he’d just get angry at her for refusing treatment, or -- it’s just easier this way, and Jyn has spent her whole life trying to find a path of less resistance.

(Not that she’s ever had any luck doing so.)

“Let’s get to the hangar before they leave without us,” Bodhi says, interrupting the non-conversation. Ben looks up at him, turning away from where Luke is arguing with someone about how much his speeder is worth.

“He’ll not leave without us,” he replies mildly, and, glancing between Bodhi and Cassian and Luke, she thinks that Ben is the only one who thinks so.

“Fine, we’ll take it,” Luke tells the trader, handing Ben a handful of credits with a sour expression. “Ugh, ever since the XP-38 came out, they just aren’t in demand,” he grumbles, but then, to the three of them: “So, what are your names?” in a somewhat-failed attempt to sound cheerful. Bodhi looks up, and when it becomes clear that neither she nor Cassian have any intention of replying, he sighs.

“I’m Bodhi,” he answers, holding out a hand to shake. “That’s Jyn and Cassian. We’re -- “

“From Jedha,” Cassian interrupts, pulling his bag over his shoulder and wincing. “We fled the Empire’s attack a few days ago, ended up here.”

“I don’t think I know where Jedha is,” Luke says slowly, brow furrowed, but Ben looks troubled.

“The Empire attacked Jedha?”

Jyn nods. “Yes,” she replies in a low voice. “The Holy City was completely destroyed.”

“The whole moon is uninhabitable now,” Cassian adds, and she glances to Bodhi, whose expression is downcast, and she pats him on the shoulder sympathetically. She vaguely recalls hearing that he was from Jedha originally, and it occurs to her that she really doesn’t know much about the man -- did he have family there? Is he in mourning, or is he (like her) shoving all his grief down into his chest, running and fighting just to forget how many people he’s loved who are dead now?

“How did they do that?” Luke asks, aghast, and she meets Cassian’s eyes, but he doesn’t have to give her any indication what he’s thinking.

“We’ll talk later,” she says, and makes for the hangar.

.

The _Millennium Falcon_ does not look anything like Jyn had imagined it -- when she’d heard of _Calrissian’s ship, the fastest one in the galaxy_ , she had pictured something sleek and modern, maybe a repurposed Imperial fighter or something to that effect. Not… whatever it actually is. Some kind of hobbled-together freighter that looks like a stiff breeze will shatter it. Cassian snorts when he sees it, and Bodhi mutters something like _should’ve bought our own_.

“What a piece of junk!” Luke cries, voicing her thoughts, and Han turns.

“She’ll make point-five past lightspeed,” he says, sounding vaguely offended. “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself. But we’re a little pressed for time, so…” he goes on, gesturing to the ship, and they look at each other.

“We’ve come this far,” she sighs, cringing when she hitches her bag higher on her shoulder and biting back a gasp as it knocks against her leg. Cassian catches her by the shoulder to steady her footing, and doesn’t say anything or even look at her, although the tightness of his grip suggests that he knows she’s still hurt.

“You all right?” Luke asks, appearing genuinely concerned. She wonders what that must be like, to meet people and just care about them right away.

“I’m fine,” she mutters. “Just stepped wrong.”

“You three look like you’ve had a rough time of it,” Ben says in a deceptively even tone, as they walk up the ramp into the freighter.

“That’s one way to put it,” Bodhi replies as they take seats around a small table. Jyn tries to subtly stretch her leg out underneath it, but they’ve only just settled down before blaster fire starts outside. “And it just gets better,” he goes on, deadpan, as Han runs in, shutting the ramp behind him and bolting through the halls yelling to Chewie to get them out of here.

“Stormtroopers?” Cassian asks as Han passes them, but it’s Bodhi who responds.

“I’m sure,” Bodhi replies. “My philosophy is, ask yourself, “what is the worst thing it could _possibly_ be?” and assume that the answer is what’s out there.”

Cassian shoots him a _look_ before standing and making for the cockpit, followed closely by Luke and Ben. Jyn wars with herself for a few moments, debating whether or not there’s any point in getting up, but decides to do it anyway.

She gets there as Han is berating Luke for being impatient.

“We’re being followed?” she asks, and Cassian glances back at her, nodding.

“Two star destroyers,” he replies. “We’re about to make the jump to lightspeed, you should sit down. Get off your leg.”

“It’s fine,” she says, but he turns her around and pushes her back out of the cockpit. The only reason she doesn’t lash out at him is because he leaves with her, hand on her back to steady her. “We should -- “

“Is that why you’re wincing with every step you take?” he counters. “ _You’re_ the one who said we should go along with this because Solo has experience evading the Empire and you wanted a day off, so let him do what we’re paying him for.”

When they get back to the table, Bodhi is still sitting right where they left him, beside the protocol droid, except he’s laid his head down on his folded arms and doesn’t look up when they slide in next to him. “You know,” he announces, either to them or to the table, “I didn’t think I’d ever miss Kaytoo, but I really miss Kaytoo right now.”

“ _Well_ ,” the droid replies in a fussy-sounding voice. It’s been making comments the entire way, but Jyn has essentially ignored everything it’s said because it’s been nothing but whiny complaints.

“You said you had a backup of Kaytoo’s data,” Bodhi goes on. “You think we could replace this one’s personality?”

“No,” Cassian replies shortly, as the droid looks at Bodhi in what is somehow unmistakably offense, even though its expression can’t change.

“I appreciate that, sir,” the droid says, and the astromech beeps. Jyn doesn’t know binary, but the tone of the beeps is enough to convey _I’d support replacing this one’s personality_ , or something like it _._ “Artoo!” it admonishes.

“When we get to hyperspace, I want to see your leg,” Cassian says sternly, and Bodhi looks up.

“I _said_ , it’s fine,” she replies through gritted teeth.

“You’ve been limping since we left Scarif, and you’re really pale,” Bodhi says, the traitor. “You _have_ at least been putting bacta patches on it, right?”

“Of _course_ I have,” she snaps. “I’m not a complete idiot.”

“How bad is it?” Cassian interjects, and she rubs at the wound through her pant leg.

“It wasn’t deep,” she answers, as though that’s all of it.

“It doesn’t have to be,” he says sharply. “What kind of wound?”

“A cut,” she replies. “It’s not bad.”

“I don’t believe you,” Cassian growls.

“Neither do I,” Bodhi adds.

Before she can say or do anything else, Ben and Luke are back, strapping themselves in, Luke muttering something unsavory about Han Solo, followed shortly by the man himself and his first mate.

“We should be coming into Alderaan in about two days,” Han says, and it’s Bodhi whose eyes widen at this.

“Two days?” he repeats, and Han smirks, sinking into his seat.

“Told ya, she’s the fastest ship in the galaxy.”

Bodhi whistles appreciatively, and she glances at him. “How long does it usually take?” she asks. He shrugs.

“In our cargo ship it would’ve been most of a week.”

“Do you have a medkit?” Cassian snaps, sounding a bit harsh, and Han raises an eyebrow.

“Somebody hurt?” he asks, frowning and standing back up when Cassian nods. “Yeah, lemme get it for you. It’s just the standard stuff, I hope it’s enough."

“Thank you,” Cassian replies through gritted teeth, and Luke looks at him, worry on his face.

“Who’s hurt?”

“Jyn,” Bodhi answers, and she scowls at him.

“I told you, it isn’t bad,” she cries, starting to lose her temper at their concern. Even though she herself was thinking that it _was_ sort of bad, to hear them talk about it over her own opinion is driving her insane. She wants to scream at both of them, either something about her having taken care of herself for the past seven years and doing just fine, or just a long, wordless scream, she isn’t sure. In spite of all the sleep she’s gotten in the past day, she still feels so drained.

(The word _infection_ crosses her mind, and she shuts it out.)

“I don’t trust your judgment,” Cassian says, and she turns her scowl onto him.

“Look after yourself, your ribs are still healing -- “

“This isn’t -- “

“What happened?” Luke cuts in, that same honest concern in his voice as before, walking over and reaching out to help Jyn out of the seat. She ignores his hand and stays stubbornly seated. “How’d you get hurt?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she snarls, and Ben folds his hands into his sleeves.

“Come now, there’s no one to hear but us,” he says evenly. “You don’t have to pretend you aren’t rebels.”

Luke looks at Ben, and then back to the three of them. “You’re with the Rebellion?” he asks, and Cassian glares at Ben.

“What makes you think we’re with the Rebellion?” he counters harshly, but Bodhi just makes a noise of frustration.

“Yes, we are with the Rebellion,” he says loudly, and then: “Well, sort of. I defected from the Empire a week and a half ago, and Jyn does whatever she wants.”

“ _Bodhi_ ,” Cassian snaps, and he raises his hands as though praying to hyperspace for the patience to deal with them.

“What’s the point in hiding it?” he asks. “If you’re right about these droids, then we need to take them to the rebellion anyway, so why pretend?”

“We don’t know if we can trust them,” Jyn hisses.

“At some point you _have_ to start having faith in people,” Bodhi counters, sounding honestly angry, words sharpened to cut her. “There _has_ to be a line. You can’t go through your whole life treating everyone like they’re about to turn on you.”

She tells herself that he’s referring just to Ben and Luke, and glances at Cassian, who meets her eyes for a second before looking away. “What if they’re with the Empire?”

“We’re not with the Empire,” Luke interjects. “Stormtroopers killed my aunt and uncle last night,” he goes on darkly, but then blinks away some bad memory and goes on. “They were looking for the droids, Artoo had a message for Ben from a princess, she said she put information vital to the Resistance in it and her father on Alderaan can retrieve it. We’re all on the same side here.”

Bodhi gives her a look like _I told you so,_  and she glances at Cassian for support, but he’s not looking at her, instead peering at the little astromech.

“So we were right,” he says quietly. “The plans _are_ with the droids.”

“Plans?” Luke asks, and he shakes his head as Han returns with a medkit in his hands.

“Like I said,” Han says, “it’s just the standard stuff, bacta patches, saline, gauze, burn cream… I think there might be some painkillers in there, but don’t quote me on it.”

Cassian stands, takes it from him, and motions for Jyn to follow him out of the common area, toward the cockpit. She almost doesn’t, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but her leg _is_ really hurting, and the idea of a painkiller is too good to pass up.

Besides, she hasn’t looked at it in over a day, and considering the pain it’s causing her, it probably does desperately need to be redressed.

It’s a little too high on her thigh to pull her pant leg up, so when they get to the cockpit and he sets the medkit on one of the chairs, she’s forced to just about take her pants off; it would be uncomfortable except that Cassian is all-business, and at least they’re alone.

There’s blood visible on the bacta patch. Not a good sign. She hadn’t realized it had reopened.

Cassian curses loudly when he peels it off and gets a look at the wound -- it looks raw and dark, and the word _infection_ crosses her mind again. She wonders if bacta patches lose their effectiveness after time, or if it was worse than she’d thought it was to begin with. Patches only have so much of the stuff on them; major, or deep, wounds won’t be fully treated with a patch.

“It didn’t look that bad earlier,” she says in a quiet voice, and Cassian gives her a glare with such violence that it almost pushes her backward with physical force. “I swear, I didn’t think it was this bad.”

“When was the last time you changed the bandage?” he snarls, and she runs a hand through her hair.

“Before they took me to Jabba’s,” she admits. “I meant to change it before we left the hospital, but I was too angry about… I forgot.”

He curses again and begins rifling through the medkit. “You need antibiotics,” he explains, visibly shaking with what might be worry and what might be rage, or both. “That’s infected.”

“Is something -- “ Bodhi’s voice starts, as he steps through the cockpit, but then devolves into what sounds like swearing, in an unfamiliar language. “Jyn!”

“I didn’t realize it was that bad!” she cries, heat rising to her face. Bodhi looks horrified.

“Ask Han or Chewbcca if they have antibiotics,” Cassian snaps, pointing at Bodhi, but it’s unnecessary, because the yelling seems to have attracted the former, as well as Luke. Han whistles at the sight of her leg, and Luke’s eyes go wide.

“We don’t,” Han replies. “All our medical supplies are in that box. But I’m sure they’ll have something on Alderaan.”

“It’ll be fine,” she says softly. “Alderaan has a great medical system, it’ll be fine. Just patch it up.”

Cassian and Bodhi exchange a look, but she can’t read it. It’s Bodhi who speaks, in a measured, determinedly-even tone:

“If that goes septic, they can’t help you,” he says, and Cassian flinches, turning to the kit and rooting through it with no apparent purpose, since he’s already sorted through everything there.

“Do you have any felty germander?” Luke asks suddenly, and everyone looks at him, so he continues. “It’s pretty common on Tatooine, you might have picked some up when you were stocking up. You can use the sap on wounds, it’s a pretty good antibiotic, I’ve used it before when I crashed my speeder.”

She’s surprised, and thinks she will be for the rest of her life, by the fact that Luke -- a near-total stranger -- cares at all to come up with suggestions for how to help her make it to Alderaan.

“Why would I have that?” Han counters, aghast. “I didn’t expect anyone to get hurt on this trip. But,” he goes on thoughtfully as he starts for the hallway, “I’ll ask Chewie. He did the stocking up, so maybe he grabbed some.”

“Either way,” Luke says, crossing his arms, “we’ll need to clean it. I bet he’s got some alcohol in the common area somewhere.”

“We have alcohol,” Bodhi says, looking up. “I got a bottle of Kowakian rum when I sold the ship.”

“How strong is Kowakian rum?” Jyn asks, and Bodhi makes a face.

“I’ll have to look at the bottle.”

“Strong enough,” Cassian says, pulling out a bacta patch and a roll of gauze, then a bottle of painkillers, which he hands to her. “You’ll need these.” To Bodhi: “Get the rum.”

She takes one of the pills dry, wincing as she does. Cassian won’t look her in the face, and she’s not sure if it’s fear or anger that stops him.

It’s only a moment or so before Bodhi returns, with Han, Chewie, and Ben in tow.

“That’s a no on the felty whatever,” Han says, as Bodhi hands off the bottle of rum to Cassian. “If his rum won’t work, I’ve got some akavit hidden somewhere, it’s about 150 proof.”

She wants to ask why he cares, why any of them care. Han would give up his stash of strong liquor for this? For some random woman he’s ferrying across the galaxy? Luke is worried, why? He doesn’t even know her last name.

“That’s a nasty-looking wound,” Ben says mildly. “I’ll make sure to speak with Bail when we arrive, you’ll need treatment.”

But _why,_  she opens her mouth to say, _why would you bother_ , but then Cassian is placing a piece of alcohol-soaked gauze against the wound and all she can do is choke back a cry in the sudden, blinding pain. He holds it there, and someone -- she has no idea who -- takes her hand and lets her squeeze it so tightly that it must hurt.

After a moment, the pain eases, only to come back as he places another piece of soaked gauze against it, wiping away blood.

She thinks she hears him comment that it’s deeper than it looks.

There’s another few moments of pain, before he tosses the gauze aside and places an ice-cold bacta patch over the wound, wrapping it in gauze and taping it in place. The pressure in her jaw and hand ease as she opens her mouth and releases the hand that was holding hers.

“You still need antibiotics,” Cassian says, and she takes several deep breaths, finally opening her eyes. Bodhi is rubbing his hand and wincing. “You’ll be grounded for a few days, easy.”

“Get some rest,” Luke says fervently, glancing at Han. “You have a room, right? She can sleep there.”

Han gives him a look that says he had no intentions of offering, but now that it’s been pointed out, he just sighs. “Yeah, Chewie will help you get there. The painkillers should kick in soon, you’ll be out for a while.”

She starts to walk, but Chewie makes a noise and, without ceremony or warning, picks her up and carries her out of the cockpit.

Cassian doesn’t look at her as they leave.


	4. a long long time ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've mentioned it on tumblr, but i realize that i should mention it here as well: i go to work at a truly painful hour, monday through friday, so updates will only come on weekends, when i actually have time/energy to write. also, yes, i know what canon says about lyra erso. i simply don't care.

for years and years I roamed, I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here  
we must have died alone, _a long long time ago_

.

.

Cassian’s anger is palpable; it radiates off him in waves, and Bodhi honestly isn't sure if it's more because of Jyn lying about her state, or if it's simply redirected worry. He regrets pointing out the possibility of sepsis.

“I'm sure she’ll be okay,” Luke tells him, either because he's incapable of detecting rage or, more likely, because he's brave to the point of foolishness. He seems to think that the three of them are safe, that Cassian would never hurt him -- that no matter how angry he is, the worst Luke will get is yelled at.

Bodhi isn't sure if he's right about that. Cassian is _truly_ furious.

But he doesn't respond at all to Luke, instead choosing to fume in the little booth, arms crossed, silent, expression stormy, and finally Luke gives up and joins Ben in what appears to be basic Jedi training.

Han scoffs about the Force, but Bodhi stays quiet; he heard, over the comm, back on Scarif, Chirrut’s prayer, Baze shouting, and only a few moments later the master switch was flipped. He doesn't know how it happened, he doesn't know how they died, either from blasters or grenades, or maybe it was the Death Star -- maybe he could have saved them, if he'd had time, if someone had waved, if he'd decided to land on the platform and check for pulses.

But what he knows is this: there were an awful lot of dead Imperials on that battlefield, and only one Chirrut and one Baze. Small bodies from cruising height, but he would have thought Baze would stand out, one way or another. But it was just Imperial armor and iron-red.

(In his dreams, he imagines that they escaped somehow, somehow found a pilot and a working ship and got off the planet and are living happily somewhere; in his nightmares, he sees their bodies and wishes he didn't.)

“What do you think?” Ben asks, sounding half-amused, and Bodhi starts out of his reverie.

“You're asking me?” he replies dumbly, and Ben nods, encouraging. Bodhi blinks, worries his lip, tries to put his past week and a half into some kind of order in his head. It's hard, and he's not sure if it's because of how overwhelming it all is or because of some lingering effects of the Bor Gullet, or both. “I don't know,” he answers finally, softly. “I -- we had these friends, they were, I don't know guardians of something, I think -- “

“The Whills,” Cassian says, the first words he's spoken since yelling at Jyn hours ago, and everyone looks at him. “They were Guardians of the Whills.”

There's something odd in his tone, but Bodhi can't identify it. Something heavy, and hard.

“From NiJedha?” Ben asks, and Cassian nods.

“He -- Chirrut was his name, and Baze,” Bodhi says. “Did you know them?”

“I couldn't say,” Ben replies thoughtfully. “I spent little time in the Holy City.”

“Then no,” Cassian says. “You'd remember Chirrut.”

“He was blind,” Bodhi adds helpfully, but Ben shakes his head, and for some reason this disappoints him. He'd sort of hoped to hear something of Chirrut’s history from an old Jedi, to sort of -- sort of bring him back to life for a moment, an anecdote. It's hard to let go of almosts, he's realizing: the decision you _almost_ made, the friendships you _almost_ formed, the family you _almost_ had.

It's suddenly clear to him, why Jyn reacted the way she did to the man saying he knew her mother.

He coughs a bit against the emotion rising in his chest, burning. “He -- Chirrut, he believed in the Force. I'd swear he was a Jedi, he had this, uh, this prayer he'd repeat, _I am one with the Force and the Force is with me_. Those were… those were the last words I heard him say, over the comm. I think he's the one who flipped the master switch so I could -- so we could finish the mission. I don't know how. There were a lot of dead Imperials on the battlefield when I flew over it.”

“And you think it was the Force?” Han says, almost accusing. Bodhi shrugs.

“I don't know. But I know one person couldn't have made it across that battlefield, and there weren't a lot of us left by then.”

“It was the Force,” Ben says, with conviction. “Take comfort in it,” he adds, directed at Bodhi. “Those strong in the Force, even if not Jedi… they live on. Your friends are still with you.”

 _I'll believe in the Force for that_ , he thinks. _I'll believe in_ that _, at least_.

He tries to smile, but fails. “That’s something,” he says, because it’s the only thing that he can say that’s true.

.

Jyn stumbles out of Han’s room a solid fourteen hours after Chewie carried her to it, muttering darkly about _what the hell was in those painkillers_ , and Cassian is torn between wanting to help her and wanting to strangle her. He and Ben are the only ones awake, playing a listless game of dejarik -- Luke is dozing on the floor under Ben’s robe, while Bodhi is sleeping (uncomfortably, probably) in the little booth half-under the table, and Han and Chewie disappeared several hours ago, either to another room (since presumably the wookie has one somewhere, or a cot at least) or else the cockpit to sleep in their chairs.

“Here,” he says, standing and gesturing to his seat. “You shouldn't walk on that leg, you're making it worse.”

“What was I supposed to do?” she counters, but without bite, and takes the seat, wincing. “Wait for Han to come down and snuggle?”

The thought bothers him deeply, but he doesn't touch it. “You could have called for one of us, we'd’ve come and got you.”

“It's not going to break off if I take a dozen steps,” she sighs. “I can --  “

“You can ask us for help when you need it,” he snaps, and she won't meet his eyes. Good. It means she knows she made a mistake.

“I really didn’t think it had gotten infected,” she says softly.

“Why didn’t you say anything when you noticed it?” he asked, sounding -- if he’s judging -- measured and reasonable, which he thinks is a lot kinder than he ought to be. She cringes.

“It…” she sighs, runs a hand over her face, and he can practically hear her warring with herself, whether or not to lie. “I didn’t want us to have to go back to the hospital. It would have been too much trouble.”

 _Too much trouble?_ he wants to shout at her. _Like going to Tatooine when you owed Jabba the Hutt money?_ He can’t think of many things that would be more trouble than that, but --

She won’t want to be called out on it. 

(What does it matter?)

He means to say something about that not being a great excuse, or something about how many godsdamned times he asked if she was all right only to be lied to, he'd thought they were past this, but what comes out is:

“What did you give Jabba?”

She stills. “What?”

“The price you paid for going back to Tatooine,” he clarifies, since he's already jumped in so he might as well swim. “To save my life. What was it?”

She's quiet for a moment, and Ben leans forward slightly. “You should answer him,” he says quietly, and she looks up, meets the old man’s eyes. Even from this angle, he can see the vulnerability there, and he sort of regrets asking, especially when he already knows. But he has a point to make, and at any rate, he doesn't know what it _really_ was, to her.

“When you knew my mother,” she starts to ask Ben, and a spike of anger lances through him, but before he can say anything, she goes on, “did she have a necklace?”

“The last time I saw her, yes,” Ben answers, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. “A kyber crystal, it was.”

Jyn nods slowly, once, twice, and it creeps under Cassian’s skin. “Where did it come from?” she asks, and Ben tilts his head, so she continues, sounding very small: “I never knew. She gave it to me right before she died, but I was so young… I just knew it was important to her.”

The creeping feeling gets worse, as Ben looks from Jyn to Cassian, as though trying to ask without asking, why he isn't speaking. But he's not sure he _could_ speak right now.

He can't quite remember his point anymore. Something about her being worth at least that much to him, and how angry might she be if he'd done the same, after all she's given up for him, but somehow he didn't quite think it was _that_ much.

Cassian has nothing left of his parents except the color of his eyes and the accent on his tongue, but he thinks that if he had anything of his mother's -- especially anything that had been important to her, that she'd given him right before dying -- Jabba would have had to pry it out of his cold, dead hands.

“It came from her lightsaber,” Ben answers, and for some reason this makes Jyn flinch. “She was, briefly, a member of the Jedi order, but she was… ill-suited to the path, I'm afraid, for all that she believed in it. Lyra was exceptionally passionate, a trait which does not suit a Jedi.”

“Why not?” Jyn asks, half-accusing, a little harsh, like salt on a raw wound. “What happens when a Jedi is passionate?”

“Sometimes nothing, save for a poor Jedi with lacking control,” Ben replies, but his tone is darkened. “Other times… Darth Vader is the result.”

“Darth Vader was a Jedi?” Cassian asks, because although he's heard that the man (if he can be called that) was a Force-user, he'd sort of assumed that Darth Vader was what you ended up with when a Force-sensitive person didn't have any guidance. Ben nods.

“A student of mine, as a matter of fact,” he says, devoid of emotion. “Exceptionally talented, and, many years ago, exceptionally kind. But passionate, always filled with fire like Lyra had. But where Lyra had the sense to leave the Order and pursue a life of peace, Vader allowed it to corrupt him. It's as much my fault, I should have guided him better, however…” he sighs, eyes distant, lost in an old memory. “He was my first, and best, pupil,” he says finally. “I was unwilling to give up on him, to the detriment of all.”

Another voice pipes up at this, startling them. Luke. “I don't think it's your fault,” he says, and Cassian turns, wondering how long he's been awake, but then, they haven't exactly been quiet. “I don't think you should ever give up on someone.”

Ben seems at a loss for words, but Jyn answers, “You're young, yet,” as though she's more than a handful of years his senior.

“I can't think of anything that would change my mind,” he says resolutely, voice soft but carved out of stone nonetheless. Cassian, very sharply, does not want Luke to ever encounter something that will. There should be people like Luke in the galaxy somewhere, people who have faith and hope tattooed into their bones, who are fundamentally good and can never be swayed, who won't let all the cruelty in the universe strip their compassion from them.

There should be people in the galaxy who are disgusted with people like him.

“You never can,” Jyn replies. “It's always something worse than you can imagine.”

“Maybe you'll never find it,” Cassian says quietly. “For your sake, I hope you don't.”

Luke doesn't seem to have an answer for that, but he looks… sad, strangely sad, like he feels bad for them, and he probably does. Cassian would have expected irritation, or trouble, or exasperation -- sympathy is an emotion he's unfamiliar with being shown.

After a moment that stretches on in the quiet of the ship, the backdrop of humming and buzzing instruments seeming to grow louder until they become deafening, Jyn takes a deep breath.

“So my mother left the Order?” she asks Ben, rhetorically. “When?”

Ben seems glad for the change of subject, although Cassian can't say what exactly it is about him that gives off the impression. “During the Clone Wars,” he answers. “Officially, her reason was disagreements with the Council regarding the Separatists, but I've always believed a young engineer had very much to do with it,” he explains with a small smile directed at Jyn, before sobering up again. “Not a moment too soon, as a matter of fact. Had she stayed much longer, she would have been killed with the rest of them. I suppose it's all for the best.”

“I refuse to believe that,” Jyn says softly, so softly that he can barely hear her. “It's not for the best. It just _is_. ‘For the best’ would be a galaxy where the Empire never formed at all.”

After a moment of deliberation, Ben replies in a measured voice, “It's been said that a person may only learn their true mettle in times of strife. For good or ill, you would not be the same person in that ‘best’ galaxy.”

He sees her hand clench into a fist. “I can only speak for myself,” he says sardonically, “but that's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make.”

She finally glances at him sidelong, with a cynical breath of a laugh; Luke looks at him as though offended by the idea. “I'd rather not be me, if it's all the same,” she mutters, but Ben raises a hand.

“But would you rather he not be him?” And to Cassian: “Or her not to be her?”

Neither of them reply to that, and he's glad of it; he's not sure how he'd respond to either answer from Jyn (particularly when he’s still angry with her), and he _won't_ put his own into words. Ben treats the silence as though it's a reply in and of itself, and honestly, it is-- both yes and no.

 _Yes, I'd rather Jyn not be Jyn if it meant that she was happy instead of plagued by abandonment and loss; no, I'd rather keep this Jyn, selfishly, because I can't imagine a galaxy where I never met her_.

Ben’s point is made, and Cassian’s with it, even -- sacrificing themselves comes naturally to the both of them, but they’d sacrifice everything else before they'd sacrifice the other -- and the old man is both wise enough, and kind enough, to let the matter drop without drawing attention to it.

“There's little sense in wondering what might have been, in a better galaxy,” Ben murmurs. “It is for the best in _this_ one, under _these_ circumstances. That's all any of us can strive for.”

A sober silence falls at that, broken after a moment by a groan from under the table: Bodhi.

“Can we talk about something else?” he grumbles. “You woke me up for the most depressing conversation in history.”

“How long have you been awake?” Cassian sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, a failed attempt to stave off a headache.

“Long enough,” he says, sitting up and stifling a yawn, and then, to Jyn: “How do you feel?”

Jyn shrugs. “I’ll live.”

“You _hope_ ,” Cassian snaps darkly, the anger flaring up again, and hotter, at her flippancy. She looks at him, but her expression gives no indication what she’s thinking, which is -- for some reason -- more frustrating to him than almost anything else. She’s shutting him out, and it’s _infuriating_ , that she would do this, after everything.

(It occurs to him, somewhat shamefully, that his anger might be part of the reason she’s shutting him out. Maybe she’s picked up on the reasons why, the reasons he won’t even allow to form as thoughts but somehow can’t hide away; maybe she’s shutting him out because she doesn’t want him to care about her. Maybe she’s shutting him out because it’s easier than shutting him _down_. The thought makes his jaw ache, puts him even more on-edge, makes him want to stand on the edge of space and scream.)

“Well, there’s not much else we can do about it right now, is there?” she counters, matching his biting tone.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Luke looking back and forth between the two of them, as if he’s looking for an opening to step in, to make peace, and he wants to lash out at the young man, tell him that this is none of his business so he should stay out of it. But Cassian didn’t get to this point in life by lashing out.

“Jyn, he’s just worried,” Luke tells her softly, and Cassian clenches his hand into a fist; so does Jyn.

“Well, he shouldn’t be,” she snaps, and it hits him like a slap to the face. “I’ve been on my own for long enough, I can take care of myself.”

“Apparently not,” he snarls, and she rounds on him, but before she can say anything else -- the glimpse of vulnerability in her eyes suggesting that it would be something irrationally nasty -- Bodhi speaks.

“You’re not on your own anymore,” he says evenly. “You have _got_ to trust us, let us help you.”

She stills, jaw clenched, hands curled into fists, something raw on her face; she opens her mouth to speak, chin shaking, then closes it again and shakes her head.

“No,” she replies, sounding very small. “No, I don’t.”

“Why not?” Bodhi asks, genuinely hurt. “Why do you think we’re going to abandon you?”

“Because everyone does!” she shouts, visibly shaking and blinking rapidly, although no tears fall. “It’s been a week and a half, why should I think you’d care?”

“How long we’ve known each other isn’t -- “

“It took Saw eight years!” she interrupts, taking a deep and shuddering breath. “Eight years, he saved me and he raised me and then he left me for dead just like everyone else. What’s different about you?”

The last she directs at Cassian, words sharpened into a javelin and aimed at his throat, and he doesn’t have a response.

_What’s different about me?_

All the answers he can think of are either not good enough, or hinge on secrets he keeps even from himself.

What he says instead: “You can’t live like this, Jyn,” in a low voice, trying to bite back anger and hurt because she’s angrier and hurting more, and he knows he’ll just make all of this worse by giving into it. But her words cut deep, the implications of them cut deeper, and Cassian has always given as good as he’s gotten, always taken an eye for every eye. “You can’t shut everyone out. If that’s how you’re going to be, you should’ve stayed on Scarif.”

He turns on his heel and leaves before she can retort, hating himself for every step.

.

The silence that falls after Cassian leaves is heavy like an ocean, and she’s drowning in it.

She never should have spoken. She never should have said anything about Saw. She never -- she should have just stayed in Han’s little cot.

But -- it’s all so _sharp_ and everything about this conversation has cut her straight to the bone, to the core, down through all her walls and all her doors and all the traps she’s laid for herself in her own mind, straight down to the tiny girl who never left the bunker her mother sent her to.

In some ways, she’s still waiting for Lyra to come back to her.

“I don’t think he meant that,” Bodhi says in a low voice, after several stunned moments, and she doesn’t reply, staring hard at her hands.

 _Yes, he did_ , she thinks. He meant it, and she’s -- she’s succeeded, she’s done what the clawing fear in her heart told her to do, and pushed him as far away from her as she can, before he could leave on his own. He meant it, he meant it, he meant it.

 _He’s gone and you’re alone_. It’s what’s familiar, but it’s no comfort.

“He has a point,” Luke says, and everyone looks at him. “Shutting everyone out is no way to live. You’ve gotten a second chance, Jyn,” he adds, eyes soft like his heart and she wants to protect him and she wants to break him into a thousand pieces all at the same time. “You should use it to live.”

“What do you know of it?” she counters, but it’s more water than ice.

“If you’ll not listen to him, listen to me,” Ben says, and she turns to him. “You’ll regret far more the chances you didn’t take, the people you didn’t trust, than the ones you did who failed you.”

“I…” she starts, but doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. She feels like a fire that’s been doused, damp coals and smoke but no light or heat. Nothing left but ash.

None of this comes easy to her, none of it is natural. It used to, for a few years, when she ran with the Partisans and felt like she was a part of some greater good, but now she's gone to rust. Scraping all this old skin off is agony, and she'd almost rather leave well enough alone, except that _leaving well enough alone_ leaves her sitting here like this, bitterly wishing she could go back in time and scream at herself until she learns an ounce of flexibility, bitterly wishing she could un-say things, bitterly wishing she was someone else.

 _You should have stayed on Scarif_ , his voice echoes in her head, but it's the hurt look on his face when she lashed out at him that really digs its claws in.

He was just trying to help. They were both just trying to help.

“Bodhi, I’m sorry,” she says finally, a bit lamely, and Bodhi shrugs.

“I’ve heard worse,” he replies. “It’s gonna take more than mean words to scare us off, you know.”

 _Apparently not_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say. A small part of her is listening hard to hear if he comes back, but there’s silence from the direction he left.

 _This is what you wanted_ , she tells herself. _You wanted him to give up on you_.

Cassian isn’t like Luke, doesn’t have that kind of faith in people, that unwavering belief that people are worth believing in. Cassian is like her, who knows better than to trust people because they’re usually the ones doing the betraying; who have been burned and boiled and skinned alive by the Empire, and have no innocence left to hold onto.

“I…” she starts again, but the words that she means to say won’t come out of her throat, now that the anger has burned itself out as quickly as it came. Something about not knowing how to trust people, because it’s never paid off before, it’s never done anything but get her hurt, and she is so, _so_ sick of getting hurt. “I’m not any good at this,” she mutters, and Bodhi gives her a weak smile, but it’s Luke who stands up.

“Well,” he says, offering his hand to help her stand, “you can start by accepting help when it’s offered.”

She pauses, hesitates, because she’s not sure she’s even willing to “start” changing anything, but… she’s been existing for the past seven years, not living, and she’s _tired_. Tired of looking over her shoulder, tired of being on-guard all the time, tired of waiting in the little bunker on Lah'mu, tired of hiding, tired of fighting this battle nobody cares about but her. And so it’s either let go and give up -- to what, she thinks, to what end, now that she didn’t die on Scarif, what would “giving up” even entail? -- or reach out and try to fix it.

Words she was told once, years ago, Maia comforting her after her first attempt at a mission was a failure and left her thinking that she was worthless to the cause and Saw was going to abandon her: _the good thing about hitting the bottom is, there’s only one way you can go from there. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere, little sister._

Jyn takes his hand and lets him help her stand; it _is_ easier, with another person there to carry her weight.

“Where to?” he asks, kindly.

“Follow Cassian,” she tells him in a low voice, just shy of ashamed, but Luke simply nods and walks her down the hall toward the cockpit, as though there’s nothing at all shameful about being weak like this, as though there’s nothing at all shameful about her wanting to be near Cassian even after the fight.

“I’m sure there’s a free seat,” he says gamely. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

“You think so?” she breathes, because she very much doubts that, after the way he left, but Luke nods, certain of it.

“He will be,” he says again, firmly. “He’ll be glad to see you don’t hate him.”

She's not sure she agrees; she'd be glad to find that he doesn't hate her, honestly, although that's more than she expects.

“Are you like this with everyone?” she asks, and he glances at her, confused.

“Like what?”

“Nice,” she explains. “I haven’t given you a single reason to be kind to me.”

“You haven’t given me a reason not to be,” he counters, with a half-shrug. “You don’t need a reason to be nice to people.”

“So that’s a yes,” she sighs, but he doesn’t comment on it.

Cassian looks up when they walk in, his expression unreadable, but he stands and gestures for her to take his seat. She half-expects him to leave, but he doesn’t, and a spark of hope flickers in her chest. Maybe Bodhi was right, and he didn't mean it; maybe Luke is right, and he doesn't hate her.

Maybe.

Han glances at her from the pilot’s seat, looking like he’s only woken up a few moments ago, and it’s probably true.

“How do you feel?” he asks, and she winces, can’t look at Cassian.

“I’ve been better,” she admits, and Han gives her a wan smile.

“We’re gonna come up on the night side of Alderaan, land in Aldera,” he says. “Once we come out of hyperspace, Ben’s gonna send a message to Bail and get a med-evac for you to meet us at the landing pad. They’ll patch you up just fine.”

“Good,” she replies.

“What’s Alderaan like?” Luke asks, a bit awkwardly, glancing sideways at Cassian, and Jyn shrugs, having never been there before.

“It’s pretty,” Han answers. “Lots of wine.”

“The planet of beauty,” Cassian adds, and she looks up at him, but he’s not looking at her, although he still stands close. “I’ve only been once, to the Isatabith Rainforest, it was… unforgettable.”

“How much longer until we get there?” Jyn asks, because it's something to talk about that doesn't have anything to do with the previous day, and Han glances down at the panel in front of him.

“Day and a half,” he replies. “Give or take. We’re on the Bothan run right now, we’ll pass Lannik soon.”

“That seems out of the way,” Cassian says, making a face, but Han shrugs.

“There’s not really a direct route from Tatooine to Alderaan,” he says. “The Corellian run would have been a couple of hours faster, but it’s crawling with Imperials.”

“Fair enough,” Cassian murmurs.

“Have we gotten in touch with the Rebellion yet?” she asks, directed at him but without facing him, and he shakes his head.

"They’ve gone dark,” he answers, still not looking at her. “All frequencies are silent.” He sighs, runs a hand over his face, and she thinks he looks exhausted, and drained, and she wonders how much of it is her fault. “Could be a lot of reasons,” he continues, as though anticipating the next question. “I imagine the Empire is on high alert since Scarif.”

“What... happened on Scarif, exactly?” Luke asks, but tentatively, as though stepping out onto ice that may or may not hold his weight. Han looks around to them, curious but not commenting, and she looks up at Cassian, the taste of bile (raw shame) in the back of her throat. After a moment, Luke cringes. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked -- “

“It was the first battle of the civil war,” Cassian answers. “Officially.”

“Wait,” Han says, turning his chair around finally, eyebrows raised, “officially? The Rebellion declared war?”

“We sort of forced their hand,” Jyn admits. “The… they had the plans for a weapon on Scarif, something we have to destroy. But the Alliance wouldn’t go after them, they were too scared. So we did.”

“Who’s we?” Luke asks.

“ _We_ ,” she repeats, with emphasis, indicating to herself and Cassian. “The three of us and about a dozen others.”

“And _that_ was a declaration of war?” Han muses, looking skeptical. “Fifteen people going to an Imperial base to steal some plans?”

“No,” Cassian replies woodenly. “The declaration was Admiral Raddus showing up with the fleet to back us up.”

“Oh.”

“Did he make it out?” Jyn asks, and Cassian shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he says. “We won’t know how much of the fleet survived until we get back to base. At least a whole squadron went down on the planet.”

“That must be some weapon,” Luke says slowly, “if _that_ was the response.”

“They called it a planet-killer,” Cassian murmurs. “It destroyed Jedha, and then they used it to destroy Scarif. Everyone who was still in the planet’s atmosphere when they fired is dead.”

Luke’s eyes are wide, face pale.

“That wasn’t even its full power,” Jyn says, and Luke looks at her, horrified. “Those plans are what your droid is carrying. We _must_ get them to the Rebellion. It _has_ to be destroyed.”

“We will,” he says firmly, leaning forward in earnest. “We _will_ destroy it.”

 _With what, though_ , she thinks. At least one whole squadron died on Scarif, and if Admiral Raddus didn’t return, then the Rebellion is out a major asset -- it’s down to Mon Mothma and Bail Organa to muster up a new fleet. Bail and Alderaan might have the resources to bring them back after that fight, but it’ll be difficult, unless other planets start joining up.

But if Jedha wasn’t enough to convince them to throw their support behind the Alliance, why would Scarif be? If anything, the ravaging they took at Scarif would convince many of them of the futility of the fight.

It’s Alderaan, it’s down to Alderaan. As a major part of the former Republic and a (relatively) vocal supporter of Rebellion, if any other planets or systems join them, they’ll be joining Alderaan, not the Rebellion.

At least Bail Organa won’t back down.

They’ve got Bail, and they’ve got Alderaan, and they’ve got Mon Mothma, and they’ve got Yavin IV. They’ve got Ben, an old Jedi, and they’ve got Luke, a young one barely in training. They’ve got the plans. They’ve got Bodhi, with his inside knowledge of how the Empire works.

And… that’s about it. The full list of their assets can be counted on two hands.

_One fighter with a sharp stick and nothing to lose can take the day._

“Either we destroy it or it destroys us,” Cassian says.

“We _will_ destroy it,” Luke repeats, solid and alight with confidence. “I promise you.”

“Did the Force tell you that?” Han drawls, and Luke rounds on him.

“No, but I _know_ it,” he says. “The whole galaxy will rise up against this thing. We’ll take it down.”

“No, what’s gonna happen is, they’re gonna kill every last one of you,” Han replies, and Cassian’s jaw clenches.

“Then we die fighting,” he snaps.

“Your funeral,” Han mutters.

“So be it,” Cassian counters hotly. “Save your own skin if you like, but they’ll come for you eventually, and then who will help you?”

“Me,” Han says. “I’ll help me.”

“You mean like I helped me?” Jyn cuts in, crossing her arms, and it seems to draw Han up short. Cassian finally looks at her, but she doesn’t meet his eyes. “You’re gonna screw up the way you _just_ watched me screw up?”

“You can’t just run from everything,” Luke adds, directed at Han. “You’ve gotta fight back.”

“You’ve never been in a battle, kid,” Han says, shaking his head. “It’s easy to say that when you don’t know what it’s like.”

“And you have?” Cassian snarls. “Fine, you won’t listen to him, say it to _me._  I’ve been in this fight for twenty years, and _I_ say he’s right.”

Han looks to her for support, but she shakes her head. “You’re not gonna find an ally in me,” she says, wincing and stretching her leg out. “Two weeks ago, maybe, but not anymore.”

“Your leg hurting you?” Han asks.

“Don’t change the subject,” she snaps.

“There’s no subject here to change, sweetheart,” he counters, crossing his arms, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees Cassian twitch. “It’s not a debate. You can fight, I’m not gonna stop you. Just know, it’s hopeless.”

“Then what do you get by telling us that?” she challenges. “Moral high ground? Over a bunch of people you think are gonna die? So what if you’re right? We fight and we die, and you go off and keep doing whatever you want, all alone, until they come after all the smugglers and throw you in prison, and then what? What’s it to you? You’re gonna die one way or another,” she adds, swallowing hard. “They’re gonna come after you, for one reason or another. If it’s all the same,” she goes on, “I’m not gonna wait for them to decide how and why I die.”

Han doesn’t have an answer for that, but is too proud to admit it, so he just scowls and stands up, stalking out of the cockpit and muttering darkly about how they’re all fools.

She takes several deep breaths, closes her eyes; the truth is, her leg _is_ hurting her, but it’s going to hurt until it gets fixed, so there’s little point in making a fuss. She’s not about to take anymore of those painkillers, either, and lose another fourteen hours.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Luke says, standing up, and she glances at him as he leaves. His real intention -- to leave her and Cassian alone -- is transparent, but then, Luke doesn’t strike her as the sort of person who is any good at all at lying. His (marginally-successful) attempts at carrying a normal conversation with the two of them and Han were nice, though.

Jyn bites her tongue, tries to find the words to explain something to Cassian that she can’t even quite explain to herself. She feels hot and cold, fever coming on (bad sign), and scattered, although if that’s to do with the infection, the painkillers, or the fact that she’s made such an incredible mess of her own life, she isn’t sure.

Luckily, he speaks first.

“I’m sorry,” he says tightly, not looking at her, but it’s all right because she’s not looking at him either. “For what I said.”

She tries, and fails, to laugh. “You had a point.”

He shakes his head. “Still.”

After another moment that stretches on for much too long, he sighs, and reaches out a hand.

“Come on,” he says. “You should rest.”

She wants to say that she’s slept more than enough, but instead she blurts out, “I’m sorry,” then closes her eyes, cringing. "I was…" she tries to explain, but he surprises her.

“I know,” he replies quietly. “We shouldn't have pushed.”

“You didn’t,” she murmurs. “But I took it out on you anyway.”

“I forgive you,” he says, with a weary, almost-sincere smile, and she bites her lip, watching him carefully for a moment. She can’t identify what she’s feeling, something both warm and cold at the same time, both inviting and terrifying.

He’s still holding his hand out to help her to her feet.

 _I forgive you_ , just like that.

She takes his hand and stands, wincing at the weight on her leg, and tries not to notice how close she’s standing to him now, their hands sandwiched between her chest and his abdomen. Her eyes are closed and her forehead rests against his collarbone; he seems to hesitate for a moment, then, with a sigh she feels more than hears, he pulls her in for a hug.

 _I’m a wreck_ , she thinks, _and you deserve better_.

But Jyn is and always has been a little selfish, and so she wraps her arms around him tightly.

.

The rest of the trip passes in relative peace; Jyn spends much of it asleep -- although Han was reluctant to give her his bed again, Chewie yelled at him (Cassian has no idea if there were actual words being said, or if he was simply out-screaming Han’s protests) until he relented. Her fever is getting worse, but without any treatment better than bacta patches and hard liquor, they’re all forced to paper over it and hope for the best.

She wakes up about a half-hour before they’re supposed to land, though, and even lets him help her get up to the common area, where Bodhi is losing a game of dejarik against R2-D2 -- apparently much of the pilot’s skill with games is bluffing, and it’s impossible to bluff a droid, much to his frustration -- while Luke practices with his lightsaber.

“There’s caf in the galley,” Han says, looking up from cleaning his blaster and nodding at the small nook that passes for a galley in Han’s universe. “You look like you could use it.”

“No kidding,” she replies, running a hand over her face.

“It’s terrible,” Bodhi chimes in, scowling at the board. “I don’t recommend it for anything except scouring pots.”

“Which means it’s efficient,” Cassian sighs, standing and pouring two cups. It smells terrible, too strong and low-quality, but there’s nothing to add to it, so it’ll have to do. Jyn looks grateful when he hands her one, even though she wrinkles her nose when she takes a sip.

“I told you,” Bodhi says absently. “It’s awful.”

“It’s better than nothing,” she mutters.

Bodhi opens his mouth to respond, but instead gives a cry of dismay as one of his figures gets brutally murdered by one of R2’s. Ben looks up suddenly, going pale and stumbling backward, and Luke sheathes his lightsaber, looking confused, as he goes over to help the old man sit.

“Did you feel that?” Ben asks, looking to Luke, whose brow furrows.

“I don’t know…” he starts, sounding uncertain.

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force,” Ben explains. “As though millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced… I fear something terrible has happened.”

Luke looks from Ben to the others, worried. Cassian feels an awful sensation, like a block of ice seeping down his spine, that he’s felt only a few times before -- when he heard of the planet-killer, when he saw it over Scarif, when he saw the Rebel ships flying into Eadu.

It’s the sensation of hope dying in his hands.

“We’ll be at Alderaan in a few more minutes,” Han says slowly, standing and walking out of the common area.

“They’ll be able to tell us more there,” Bodhi suggests, and they all make their way to the cockpit, Cassian helping Jyn to limp there.

“All right, Chewie,” Han is saying, standing at one of the control panels, “cutting to sub-light engines.”

They come out of hyperspace into an asteroid field, which startles Han and Chewie.

“What the -- “ Han starts, checking several instruments. “We’ve come out of hyperspace in some kind of meteor shower or asteroid collision… it’s not on any of the charts…”

“ _No_ ,” Jyn gasps beside him, and he _knows_.

If he’s being honest with himself, he knew when Ben staggered backward, when the dread settled in. He wonders why he didn’t see it coming. They have a planet-killer, and what is the planet most openly associated with the Rebellion?

Everything seems to be happening on the other side of a long tunnel, and slowly: Luke looks around to Jyn, eyes going wide as the implication of what they’re seeing hits him; Ben bows his head; Bodhi sinks to the ground; Jyn leans heavier against him, taking rapid, shallow breaths.

“It’s gone,” he hears himself saying. “Alderaan is _gone_.”

The panels are beeping loudly, and Han says something about another ship showing up, but he can barely recognize the words, and all he can see is the shape of _it_ in the viewport, growing larger; it isn’t until Ben says, in urgency, “Turn the ship around,” and everything starts shaking that he snaps back to reality.

 _We’ve been spotted_ , he thinks, as Han yells at Chewie to lock in auxiliary power, to no avail.

 _We’ve been spotted and we’re being taken_.


	5. all hail the outlaws

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again to mechanical-orange for beta-ing this for me!

 

we're living like we're renegades, renegades  
all hail the underdogs, all hail the new kids, _all hail the outlaws_

.

.

It takes Jyn exactly fifty-three seconds to go from realization, to horror, to shock, and then to action.

Compartmentalizing always was one of her better talents; Saw taught his protege well.

“Bodhi,” she hisses, but Bodhi is still in shock, staring, eyes wide and round and bright and -- right, this is what he defected to _stop_. This is what he threw everything he had away for, faced down Saw and the Bor Gullet for, turned traitor and threw his lot in with a resistance he knew nothing of for -- to make sure that this, this thing he is seeing in front of his eyes right now, did not happen. “Bodhi, listen to me,” she snaps, shrugging Cassian’s arm away and kneeling, ignoring her leg, at the pilot’s side.

“It's gone,” he whispers, and she grabs him by the shoulders, wrenches him around to face her.

“Bodhi, what kind of scans will they do? Infrared? Thermal? Or just a manual sweep? What is the protocol?”

Bodhi blinks a few more times, swallows hard, then takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Um,” he starts, blinks again, three more breaths. Han and Chewie are giving up on auxiliary power, but she doesn't know what they'll do. “Sweep first,” Bodhi answers, voice hoarse. “They'll -- they'll send a few stormtroopers in to check it, then they'll do a thermal scan for any signs of life. We can't stay on the ship.”

“Yeah, well,” Han says, standing up, “we can't get off before they send the troopers in.”

“You have a plan, right?” Luke asks, in a tone that says the answer had _better_ not be no.

“Working on it,” Han replies tightly. “We can get into the hold, hide out there.”

“The hold?” Luke repeats, and Han pushes past him.

“Smuggler, remember? Follow me.”

Bodhi helps her stand, but he's shaking so badly that he's not much help.

(It's gone, it's just gone, where there was a whole planet with an unforgettable rainforest and lots of wine and two billion people, there's just -- just dust, chunks of rock, it's just -- )

Right, she thinks. Her leg will be a problem, and a big one. They need to get off the ship without being detected. They need to disable the tractor beam. They need to do something about her leg, her fever, since Bail can't help her anymore and even in the fastest ship in the galaxy, she probably can’t make it back to Yavin IV before going septic.

(-- no, no, no, no, without Alderaan, without Bail, what chance does the Rebellion --)

They'll need a map. They'll need disguises. They'll need --

“We can get disguises off the first stormtroopers, can't we?” she asks, to no one in particular.

“That would get us off the ship,” Cassian responds, “but they'd find the bodies on the thermal scan. Unless you have some kind of freezer?” he asks, directed at Han, who gapes, holding open the hatch.

“No, I don't have a deep freezer for _human bodies_ , what the _hell_ kind of person _are_ you?”

It didn't strike Jyn as an odd question, although everyone else is eyeing him warily.

“The kind that has infiltrated Imperial bases before,” he counters sourly. Bodhi glances up at him from the smuggling hold.

“You can't be captured,” he says, eyes wide and horrified, as though it's just occurred to him that Cassian is a spy who knows too much to be allowed to fall into enemy hands, and she realizes, glancing at his profile, that Cassian probably carries a suicide pill, for times exactly like now.

 _No_ , she thinks, and shuts off the thought. He won't, not unless he doesn't have a choice.

(And then -- what?)

“I won't be,” he replies, helping her down into the hold. “I haven't been yet, and I won't be now.”

You don't survive to his age, as a spy, unless you are _exceptionally_ good at surviving. She tells herself the thought is comforting.

(But this is different, this is the Death Star, the Empire’s shining achievement, not some outpost or crowded meeting -- )

She wishes, powerfully, that they'd kept the uniforms from Scarif. At the time, she couldn't wait to get rid of them, but now she'd just about trade an arm and a leg to get them back.

It's dark in the hold, stale air, all seven of them huddled together with the two droids, everyone trying to plan.

“We’ll need to disable the tractor beam,” Luke says, leaning forward and speaking softly. “Me and Han can do that, if Artoo can find us a map.”

“Bodhi, go with them,” Cassian says, and Bodhi turns to him, but it's too dark to read his expression. “You know how to be an Imperial, just keep your coat on and act like you belong here. If anyone asks, pretend you flew them in from --” he trails off for a  couple of seconds, then sighs in frustration “ -- Cloud City. Ben and I will take Jyn to the Infirmary, we will steal supplies. They'll have bacta there.”

“No,” Ben says slowly. “I think I will be of more use in disabling the tractor beam.”

Cassian doesn't argue.

“How do we get disguises?” Jyn asks, and Cassian hesitates, thinking.

“How long do we have before they do a thermal scan?” he asks Bodhi.

“Depends on how long it takes them to get the equipment,” he replies, audibly cringing. “Could be fifteen minutes, could be two hours.”

They can't work with that. Unless…

“Threepio,” she hisses, and the creak of metal indicates the droid turning, “can you and Artoo delay them? You know, muck up the system?”

Artoo beeps in a way that sounds affirmative, but Threepio seems less certain. “We can certainly try,” he replies, but before she can snap about how trying will not be good enough, the ship lands.

( _In the Death Star_ , she thinks, in the hysterical voice, the panic, the alarms she's ignoring even as they scream in her head. _We’re in the Death Star_.)

.

This is not going to work.

Cassian has run many, many missions for the Rebellion, in varying states of preparedness (from “two months of vocal training, a fake identity with more documentation and information than his actual identity, and a no less than seven concealed weapons” to, well, Scarif) but this -- a slapdash plan cobbled together in the five minutes they had between realizing that they were being captured and landing on the Death Star -- is beyond the pale.

The problem is too many moving parts, too many variables. How well-trained will the troopers on the Death Star be? How well-stocked is the med bay, and do the doctors have guards or military training? What kind of inventory do they keep? How many cameras, and where? It depends on Ben’s team, disabling a tractor beam they only might be able to find; it depends on the droids delaying the search; it depends on Han and Luke’s likely nonexistent skills with subterfuge; it depends on Jyn not crashing before he can get her help; it depends on them getting a hold of at least five uniforms…

It can't possibly work.

It _has_ to work. It's all they have.

“We won't have much time,” he says in a low voice, as the ship shudders to a standstill. “Don't delay.”

“It will work,” Ben says quietly, reminding him of Chirrut. “The Force will be with us.”

“ _Boy_ , I hope so,” Han replies fervently.

He'd give up a lot of things, for a stim to give Jyn right now. It would make things harder in the long run, but if she can't stay on her feet in the now, there won't _be_ a long run to worry about. He wishes he could see her, check her over.

If they're delaying the thermal scan, maybe she could stay on the ship. It would make things easier, but --

It's a _big_ if. There's no guarantee that Threepio and Artoo will be able to delay the scan for any usable length of time -- in fact, there's no reason to think they might be able to delay it at all -- and if she's caught on the ship, and captured…

Jyn won't talk, by choice, but the Empire has ways of getting what they want.

The image rises, unbidden in his head: he's seen it, before, what people look like when the Empire is through with them, and the worst part is, there's hardly ever a mark. They're alive, usually, and walking, and at the same time completely gone, all the light and life plucked out from behind their eyes.

To a man, every person he's ever seen rescued after lengthy Imperial torture has committed suicide shortly after.

Jyn, in that state --

No.

 _Don't consider it_ , he tells himself. _Stay focused on the now_. It hasn't happened yet, and he can make it not happen at all.

(Like she'd stand for being left behind, anyway.)

Footsteps above their head, the one-two march of stormtroopers, static and indistinct voices, tinny. One-two, one-two, one-two -- a pair, but they need five. The steps retreat in the direction of the common area, and another one-two cadence, another pair, walk in.

And… that's it. Two sets of two, because of course they're just a freighter and Han ejected all the escape pods back after Tatooine to get the Star Destroyers off their trail, so they probably think there's nothing of value here, nobody on-board, a decoy sent off while they escaped.

(He's torn between irritation and gratefulness -- if not for Han’s smuggling and quick thinking, they'd be completely hosed, but then, if not for Ben and Luke, they'd be back on Yavin IV.)

Focus.

(Alderaan is -- )

 _Focus_. Deal with it later.

“All right,” Han whispers. “Let's get started.”

.

The uniforms are a goddamned disgrace. This whole mission is a goddamned disgrace.

All four stormtroopers are dead in the hold, but while stormtroopers are all roughly the same size, they range from Jyn -- whose armor is loose and rattling no matter how many times she tightens the straps -- to Han -- who, before tucking his pants into his boots, appeared to be preparing for a flood. Luke’s helmet keeps falling down and blocking his sight, Ben doesn't even have a disguise, Bodhi’s flight uniform is in an embarrassing state of disrepair, and Cassian, as the only person present with any experience in undercover work, is the only person who truly knows just how absolutely, ludicrously _screwed_ they all are.

But… what is there to lose?

If they do nothing, the ship will be taken, they will be captured, Jyn will die without medical treatment, Cassian will either take the lullaby pill he keeps in his breast pocket or risk the Empire finding out everything he knows about the Rebellion, and the plans will fall back into Imperial hands. If they try this and fail, they suffer the exact same fate.

There isn't anything left to lose by gambling on sheer audacity and foolish hope, and going for it.

Ben is the only one with an ounce of real confidence, although Luke is doing a great job of faking it for Bodhi’s benefit.

“We’ve got this,” he's saying, nodding and then readjusting his helmet again. “We don't need to talk to anybody, just act like we’re supposed to be here.”

“This is not going to work,” Han groans.

“Yes, it will,” Ben replies, folding his hands into his sleeves and closing his eyes for a moment. “Our time to leave is now,” he says, with confidence like Chirrut in the Holy City, before walking right out of the ship and into the hangar, followed by Luke and Han with Chewie in cuffs between them.

Jyn glances at him, shrugs, and follows; he stays close by her side, to catch her if she starts to falter, but she's walking with confidence and a nearly-indiscernible limp. If he couldn't hear her labored breathing, he'd almost be fooled.

Bodhi is shaking his head the entire way out, but once they reach the hangar, he covers it up with some success.

Jyn, for all her feigned strength, is still moving slow, so by the time they reach the terminal, Artoo is already plugged in. Somehow, nobody has seen them -- or if they have, they haven't bothered them.

“All right, Artoo,” Luke hisses. “Where is the -- huh?”

The astromech makes several rapid noises, sounding excited, and C3PO translates.

“He says that the Princess Leia is aboard this space station.”

There's a moment of silence, as Luke looks around at them before: “Well, we've gotta rescue her.” As though it’s obvious, the only course of action there is. As if this is a little jaunt, no danger at all.

Cassian opens his mouth to say that they are in entirely deep enough shavit _without_ turning this into a retrieval mission, but then hesitates.

Nobody comes back from lengthy Imperial interrogation, not really, but she's only been here a few days. She _can_ be saved, _if_ they can get her. And she's one of the last Alderaanians left in the galaxy now. And without Bail, the Rebellion will be in desperate need of someone to step into the vacancy -- who better than his beloved daughter?

The Rebellion won't survive the loss of Alderaan without someone who can wrench them all back together, and Mon Mothma, for all of her virtues, is too much a politician of peace to steer them into the path of open war. They don’t need a senator, they need a _General_.

He's only met Leia once, but she left an impression of power and authority that went far beyond her name and title.

They, the Rebel Alliance and the galaxy as a whole, _need_ Leia. She can't be allowed to die here.

He can almost hear Kaytoo telling him the painfully-low odds of survival and how much lower they'll be if they take on another objective… or at least trying to.

“Where is she?” Cassian asks, and Artoo beeps.

“The Detention Level, sir,” C3PO translates. “Sub-level 172, accessible from a handful of elevators. The closest one is not far.”

Jyn’s hand is on his arm, right at the joint, squeezing tightly as she fights to stay on her feet.

“All right,” he says, gesturing at Luke and glancing around to make sure they haven't been spotted. “Luke, Han -- take Chewie to the Detention Level, get the Princess. Ben, you and Bodhi find the tractor beam. Artoo and Threepio, find the command center and jam everything you can touch.”

Ben folds his hands into his sleeves. “It will be easier for me to disable the tractor beam alone,” he says, and Cassian is in no mood for arguing with Jedi. This mission is a massive cock-up anyway, if the old bat thinks he can handle the tractor beam on the Death Star all by himself, kriffing _fine_ , he can do it.

It honestly can't make their odds significantly worse, at this point. There isn't much that can.

“Do what you like,” he snaps. “Artoo, where is the medbay?”

Artoo beeps again, and C3PO tells him the level, and points to the nearest elevator.

As he stalks to it, trying his best to subtly support Jyn’s weight without it being obvious, he hears Bodhi saying, “I guess I'll help with the princess, then.”

“Is it a good idea to leave them alone?” Jyn asks, when they're in the elevator. She takes the opportunity to lean against him and take some weight off her leg, and she sounds tired, breathy. Like she's running on nothing but pure stubbornness, and even that well is going dry.

“There wasn't another option,” he replies.

“Luke or Bodhi could have come with me,” she says, voice sounding weighed-down. “You're the only one with experience, you ought to’ve gone after the princess.”

He gets lucky then, when the elevator door opens and spares him from having to answer.

(The truth is, the thought of sending someone else with Jyn never even crossed his mind.)

She rallies, and manages to walk with a reasonable facsimile of strength through the halls, until Cassian spots what he's looking for -- an out-of-the-way supply closet that no one is much bothering to monitor -- and steers her toward it.

But of course, the stormtrooper’s ID card doesn't work on the door. He isn't really sure why he thought it might, aside from blind hope.

Jyn clenches her hand into a fist, takes a deep breath, and then flags down a passing medic of some kind -- a tech, maybe, or a courier -- who looks far too busy to waste time with them. “Hey, can you get us in here?” she asks, catching him by the arm and sounding for all the world like normal. “Got a whole list of shite they want down at Hangar Seven.”

“They didn't give you an access card?” the man snaps in a harried tone, but opens it anyway. “Bloody _useless_ officers on this thing,” he adds in a mutter, then bustling off before they can waste any more of his time.

“Nicely done,” Cassian says in a low voice, pulling the door shut behind him and easing her down to sit against the wall, where she stretches her leg out and takes several rapid, shallow breaths.

He pulls her helmet off and tries not to wince: she's pale, hair damp with sweat, and her eyes are unfocused. Crashing. Pulling herself together to get the door open seems to have sapped the last of her reserves. She needs pure bacta on that wound, she needs a stim, and she needs antibiotics for about a month, in that order.

“Stay with me, Jyn,” he tells her fervently, and she nods a couple of times, but sleepily.

“All the way,” she breathes.

.

 _Right_ , Bodhi thinks, trying to get his story straight even as every instinct in his head screams, _I'm just a pilot. I picked these three up in Cloud City after the Wookie started a fight, and since Luke --_ no, wait, LK-some numbers _\-- was scheduled to be transferred here, we came here, and…_

He takes a deep breath. Nobody cares. The Empire does not give a single steaming bantha crap who they are, where they came from, or why. _Prisoner transfer from Cloud City_ will suffice.

If they survive this -- and that is a very, _very_ big if -- it'll be because the Empire simply doesn't care about their individual members.

They make it to the Detention Level with nearly-worrying ease, even though Chewie’s cuffs won't clasp shut and anyone who pays them even a moment's attention will recognize Bodhi, and neither Luke nor Han know anything at all about where they are or what they're doing.

(He corrects himself: if they survive this, it will be because the Force willed it. Nothing short of divine intervention could make this work.)

The elevator door opens behind them, into the Detention Level, and Bodhi bites back a groan as they step out: there’s an officer, is looking directly at them, and four other grunts with weapons. They are all gonna die. This is not going to work.

“What is this?” the officer challenges, and Luke speaks.

“Prisoner transfer, sir,” he says.

“Where from?”

Luke says, “Cell Boock 1137” at the same time that Bodhi says, “Cloud City.”

There's about three seconds of total, horrified silence.

And then Han says, “All right, then,” and begins shooting.

.

Cassian gives her the stim first, since it’ll take a few minutes to kick in, and hands her a couple of antipyretics as something of an afterthought; stims are known to increase body temperature, and she’s already running a fever. The bacta should help, but the absolute _last_ thing he needs is Jyn to be hopped up on amphetamines _and_ delirious with high fever.

He stashes another couple of stims and as many antibiotics as he can get his hands on into an opaque biohazard bag, before grabbing the bacta and fresh bandages.

Jyn laughs when she sees the bag, which cannot be a good sign, either for her health or for their ability to get out of here undetected. She’s barely holding her head up steady, eyes wide and pupils blown-out from the stim.

“Should’ve brought your messenger bag,” she tells him, words slurring together, and he rolls his eyes.

“Didn’t go with the outfit,” he replies, in a passable attempt at humor to cover up his panic. She seems to find it _hilarious_.

Definitely delirium, made worse by the stim. Hopefully the antipyretics kick in soon.

“I’m just -- “ she chortles, gesticulating wildly. “I can just _see_ you putting together the perfect outfit.”

He tries to laugh, without success. “It’s funny, yeah,” he says, laughing desperately and without a shred of sincerity. “We need to _get moving_.”

“With fur and frills,” she giggles, still caught on the delirious train of thought.

“Thank you,” he replies shortly, trying to get her to let him redress the wound, which she seems reluctant to allow him to do.

“I always think of you as having fur,” she says, and that actually brings him up short, startles him out of the panic for a moment.

“What?”

She makes a vague hand motion to indicate… something. “You know, like your furry coat from Jedha. I just always think of you wearing that. Like a halo of… fur.”

He gapes at her for a second, before shaking his head and motioning for her to move to the table and sit up so he can deal with her wound. “I’m from a cold planet,” he admits, and she allows him to help her to her feet, eyes wide like this is the most amazing thing she’s ever heard.

“Really?” she gasps, blinking rapidly and looking confused.

“Really,” he replies, hoping desperately that the confusion on her face is a good sign, that she’s starting to be a little more aware of her surroundings. He regrets giving her the stim before the antipyretic. He should have brought the fever down first. He _really_ should have addressed the fever first. But she’s allowing him to treat her, so he’s willing to count it as a tentative win, until:

“That is _not_ how I imagined you taking off my pants,” she says, and he freezes, closes his eyes for a moment and prays to the Force and any gods that might be listening for patience.

“You’ll be embarrassed if you remember saying that, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it,” he tells her honestly, because she really, _really_ will be, but she only giggles again, and he peels back the bacta patch from the wound. It looks no worse than before, but he doesn’t know enough about medicine to know if that’s really a good thing or not. Maybe they’ve kept it stable, and once she gets proper treatment, she’ll be fine.

(Or maybe she’s gone septic, the infection spreading in the bloodstream, which is why her fever has gotten higher and higher, and the Rebellion’s patchwork medical system won’t be able to save her.)

“‘S true,” she slurs, leaning heavily against the wall. “I’ve imagined -- “ she starts, pauses, and he braces himself, but then, with exaggerated motions -- “I’m gonna stop talking.”

“Good idea,” he replies, squeezing what is probably entirely too much bacta directly onto the wound. At this point, it can’t hurt, and he’s never heard of bacta toxicity, anyway. If she’s regaining a measure of clarity, it’s a good sign.

(Traitorously, a tiny part of him really wants to know what was going to come after the _I’ve imagined_ , but he shuts it down. Deal with it later.)

He gets the wound redressed, and a new bandage wrapped around her leg, and she must be coming back to herself, because she allows him to pull her pants back up and re-position her stolen armor. She’s weaving still, even while stationary, and her breathing is heavy and her pupils are still drugged-wide, probably seeing in colors that don’t exist, at least until the fever fully breaks, but at least she’s less _loud_.

“We need to -- “ he starts, but then stops entirely as the sirens start going off.

“Oh, you’re _joking_ ,” she groans.

.

Surprisingly, between Han and Luke’s (mostly Han’s) shooting and Chewbacca’s brute strength, they make short work of the people in the command center of the Detention Level, and someone (Bodhi isn’t sure who) even has the presence of mind to shoot out all the cameras.

“We gotta find out which cell this princess of yours is in,” Han says, shoving the officer off the console and peering at it. “Here it is, 2187. You go get and her, I’ll hold ‘em off here.”

“I’ll jam the elevator,” Bodhi says, even though he knows that can only buy them a few minutes, at best. The Empire is good at a lot of bad things, but efficiency is their greatest strength. Still, as he’s learned, a few minutes can make or break the whole day.

Unfortunately, at that point, Han decides to address the beeping console, which is no doubt some higher-up trying to contact them.

“Uh…” he starts, voice softer and beseeching, a good start. “Everything’s under control here, situation normal.”

“What happened?” the tinny voice on the other end asks.

“We had a slight… weapons malfunction, but, uh…” he explains, and every curseword Bodhi has ever learned passes through his head, as he tries to motion to Han to stop talking, but Han isn’t looking at him. “Everything’s perfectly fine, we’re all fine here now, thank you… how are you?”

At least he has the presence of mind to cringe, knowing how awful he is at this. He finally looks up, and winces again at the way Bodhi is gaping at him.

 _How are you?_ he mouths incredulously, and Han winces yet again.

“We’re sending a squadron,” the voice on the other end says, and Bodhi makes forceful hand motions across his throat, just cut the signal, _just stop talking!_ But Han keeps digging.

“Uh… negative, negative, we have a, uh… a reactor leak here, uh, now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Uh… large leak, very dangerous.”

“Who is this?” the voice asks. “What’s your operating number?”

Han starts to reply, with a tentative, “Ah…” before giving up entirely and shooting the comm. “Boring conversation anyway,” he mutters, then yells at Luke how they’re gonna have company.

“What the -- “ Bodhi starts loudly, but Han waves him off with irritated nonchalance, an expression Bodhi truly did not believe was possible before.

“You know, if you’d wanted a spy to do this, you should’ve sent the spy,” Han snaps, although the back of his neck is red.

“Nobody thought you would mess it up this bad!” he shrieks, no longer caring how hysterical or stupid he sounds. He really should have stopped Han, he thinks. He should have stepped in and said something. But it was like watching a star destroyer crash-land -- you were fascinated by the sheer horror unfolding in front of your eyes.

 _How are you?_ Bodhi is never going to let Han live that down for as long as the two of them live.

(Which, granted, may only be a few minutes.)

The stormtroopers blast through the elevator doors, and Bodhi figures that all of his efforts maybe bought them thirty seconds of peace. Great. He’s doing great. This is definitely the job for him.

He should have taken Jyn to the medbay and let Cassian deal with this. Cassian never would have let “how are you” happen. Cassian would have taken control with professionalism and courage and certainty. Bodhi knows a bit about first aid, he could have helped Jyn at least as much as Cassian can, but _no…_ Cassian had to go with her, because Cassian cares more about Jyn than about _literally anything else_ , up to and including all the rest of their lives. He’s only a little bitter, really.

They join Luke in the hallway, where he’s freed the princess -- a tiny woman, smaller even than Jyn, dressed all in white, with her hair tied in tight buns on either side of her head.

“Can’t get out that way,” Han says, as the princess runs up behind them. She doesn’t look even a little bit afraid; in fact, she looks irritated by this whole thing, like it’s interrupted her beauty sleep.

“Looks like you’ve managed to cut off our only escape route,” she snaps, and Bodhi sighs.

“It’s his fault,” he says, indicating to Han and trying to make himself as small as possible. This is not his area of expertise. He’s good with ships, and mechanics, and gambling, and haggling, and even a little bit with first aid, but not with spying and infiltrating and retrieving prisoners from top-security Imperial space stations that can destroy whole planets in one shot.

( _It should really be Cassian here right now_ , he thinks hysterically, and with no small amount of bitterness.)

“I had it all under control,” Han lies, openly, and at least the princess doesn’t seem to believe it.

“I don’t buy that for a second,” she counters, and Han turns to her, glaring.

“Maybe you’d like it back in your cell, your highness,” he sneers, but then the stormtroopers are shooting at them, so they all hide behind struts jutting out from the walls. It’s paltry cover. They are all gonna die.

Luke tries to contact Threepio, but nobody answers. Probably the droids have been shot and killed, or else mind-wiped, or else the knowledge they have has been stolen by the Empire thus rendering every sacrifice made in the last week totally null, or something else completely awful because nothing is going according to their very simple (if very sketchy) plan.

Han and Luke both try to fire back, but if they hit anything, there’s no indication. He looks across the hall to the princess, steel-eyed and diamond-strong, and feels out of his depth.

“I don’t think there’s any other way out,” Luke cries.

“If we can reach the elevators on the other side of the cell block -- “ Bodhi yells, but Han cuts him off with a growl.

“It’s no good, we can’t get out of this position, there’s too many of them. We can’t hold them off forever.” And, to Luke: “What now?”

“This is _some_ rescue,” the princess snarls. “What do you mean, you didn’t have a plan for getting out?”

“We _did_ ,” Bodhi cries. “But it didn’t account for being pinned down by stormtroopers! I had a _great_ plan to talk us out of here, but no, _you_ had to start shooting!”

“He screwed up first!” Han counters, indicating at Luke with his blaster and, although he’s correct, Bodhi is feeling significantly more charitable toward Luke, whose only crime was not remembering what Cassian had said about their story, than to Han, who asked an Imperial officer how he was.

The princess looks between the three of them, and then, without ceremony, grabs Luke’s blaster and shoots the grate between Han and Bodhi to open up the wall.

“What the hell are you doing?” Han yells.

“ _Somebody_ has to save our skins,” she shouts back, shooting her way across the hall until she’s standing between them, then throws the blaster back to Luke. “Into the garbage chute, flyboy!” she cries, and jumps through the hole.

Bodhi hesitates for a second, but only a second, before he follows her.

.

Nobody pays any attention to them -- even with the biohazard bag -- as they make their way back to Hangar Seven. Everybody seems concentrated on the Detention Level and honestly, if Cassian had to make the decision, he’d almost just leave them and take Han’s ship away from here (assuming that Ben has disabled the tractor beam), except Bodhi is with that team, as well as the princess, and he can’t leave them here. He’d also be a little sad to leave Luke and Chewie for dead, but he would do it if he could get Bodhi and Leia back, or in a pinch, just Bodhi.

(Han can screw himself.)

Jyn is moving like a bird, all twitching movements and looking from side to side, and he thanks his lucky stars that everyone else is on high alert for people who aren’t them, or else she’d be _really obviously_ on stims, even with the stormtrooper mask hiding her face.

“What the hell did they do?” she asks him, and he shakes his head, nodding at the two droids standing -- conspicuously, in any other circumstance, but right now nobody gives a damn about droids -- by the same terminal they started this nonsense at.

“Maybe they’ve already made it back to the hangar,” he says, with confidence he doesn’t feel, and she snorts.

“We’ve never been that lucky.”

It’s… true, honestly, but he doesn’t feel like saying so.

And, then, of course, they haven’t.

But at least Threepio and Artoo have, so there’s something.

“Threepio,” he sighs in relief, and the droid looks up at him, and maybe he’s projecting, but he at least looks sort of pleased.

“The thermal scan has been delayed, sir, for at least another fifteen minutes,” Threepio says, and then tilts his head. “However, Master Luke has not checked in.”

“Let me see that,” Cassian says, taking the comm from the droid. As soon as the droid releases the comm, Luke’s voice starts coming from it, loud and frantic.

“ -- all the garbage mashers on the detention level!” Luke cries, hysterically, and Artoo immediately plugs into the system. “ _Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!_ ” he shouts again, clearly panicked.

“What the hell -- “ Jyn starts beside him, and he pinches the bridge of his nose.

Artoo shuts down the trash compactors, and he can hear Luke and Han and Bodhi and a female voice which is probably -- or rather, _had goddamned better be_ \-- the princess all laughing in relief and exhilaration, and he tries to compose himself before he speaks again.

“But…” he says, eyes closed, “ _why_ are you in a trash compactor?”

.

“But why are you in a trash compactor?” Cassian’s voice asks, and honestly, Bodhi does not have a good answer.

It’s Han’s fault. That’s pretty much all he’s got.

“Who is that?” Leia asks, and Luke glances at her.

“It’s Cassian,” he replies. “We met him on -- “

“ _Andor?_ ” Leia cries, shoving herself forward and snatching the comm from him. “ _Cassian Andor?_ He’s _alive?_ ” She looks around in confusion, which is matched by the other two men. “How did this go so wrong if Captain Andor was involved?”

“Because he was too busy fixing up his girlfriend’s leg,” Han replies sourly, and Leia glares at him.

“Captain Andor is a professional,” she snaps. “Unlike _you_.” And then, into the comm: “Captain Andor, this is Princess Leia Organa of… the Rebel Alliance.”

She’s adapting well, Bodhi thinks, to the loss of Alderaan and everything she’s ever known. Then again, there’s a sort of person who can take their pain and turn it into an eternal flame; Jyn is one of them, and maybe Cassian, although after the twenty years he’s spent in the Rebellion, it’s started to die out. Bodhi does not think he’s one of them.

There’s a moment, and then Cassian’s voice returns:

“Your highness,” he says evenly, and Bodhi feels like he knows Cassian well enough by now to detect the weariness in his tone. He wonders how Jyn is doing; for all his bitterness about, well, everything, to be honest, he really is worried about her. She was in _rough_ shape. “What can I do to help you?”

Leia smiles at this, apparently mollified by the sound of someone treating her with appropriate deference, but frankly, after Bodhi has been in a literal garbage can with someone, he feels that there’s only so much dignity they’re owed.

“Are you in contact with my astromech droid?” she asks, sounding much, much kinder than he’s heard her yet. Han looks personally offended by her friendly tone with Cassian.

“We are, your highness,” Cassian replies. “In Hangar Seven. R2-D2 is connected to the mainframe and working on releasing the magnetic seal on the… room you’re in.”

 _Room_. Bodhi likes that, and Luke even snickers, but that could be the sheer relief.

“We will meet you at Hangar Seven in ten minutes,” Leia says. “I trust you will meet us there, and we can then leave for the rebel base.”

“Of course,” Cassian says. “We will be prepared to leave upon your arrival.”

Bodhi almost -- almost -- points out that that fact is really dependent on Ben, and whether or not he’s disabled the tractor beam, but Leia is much more calm and composed now that she’s dealt with someone she deems worthy of her attention (or at least, someone she doesn’t believe will get her killed), and he _really_ doesn’t want to tarnish that. Han opens his mouth to respond, probably to say the same thing about Ben and the tractor beam, and Bodhi kicks him in the back of the knee to shut him up.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Han grumbles instead.


	6. and now nowhere to hide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what is this, a monday update? yes, in part because i finished the last chapter early in the weekend, which gave me time to get the bulk of this one done as well. also i had Ideas.

seal my heart and break my pride; I’ve nowhere to stand _and now nowhere to hide  
_ align my heart, my body, my mind, to face what I’ve done and do my time

.

. 

Jyn has few memories of Galen Erso: one or two happy days that haunt her nightmares, the last hug he gave her before going with the man in white, a holoimage of a man on the verge of tears.

So it's unfair, blindingly unfair, that he haunts her now, here, in his creation and his revenge. Everywhere she turns she sees her father reflected in stormtrooper masks, hears echoes of his voice. It's the drug, and maybe some lingering effects from the fever she's still coming down from, but it doesn't make it any less terrible.

The only thing keeping her steady is Cassian's presence beside her.

The droids are talking, but it all sounds jumbled, and maybe alarms are going off -- she's certain they were earlier, because Cassian responded to them, but she isn't sure now if he's ignoring them because they're endless, or if they've stopped everywhere except in her head -- and the lights on the console look like stars.

She weaves, and Cassian catches her. She's taken off her helmet, because it's impossible to breathe in it, and her hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat. It's a good sign, relatively, since it means her fever is breaking, but it's bad in every other way. She can't stop shaking, feeling like her bones are vibrating in her skin.

Jyn understands why Cassian gave her the stim, and she even agrees that it was necessary, but she _really_ _kriffing_ _hates_ them all the same.

Her father's voice echoes overhead, but all it says is _Intruders_ _on the Detention Level_.

It takes a moment for that to sink in, and another moment for her to remember that she already knew about it.

The more her fever breaks, the clearer her head will become -- she has no memory at all of getting into the medbay, a vague memory of Cassian saying that she would be embarrassed if she remembered saying whatever she had just said, and slightly more coherent memories of getting from the medbay to the droids.

(She clearly remembers the debris of Alderaan, because why should she be so lucky as to have illness take her worst moments out of her head?)

Cassian catches her again, hands on either side of her face. He looks pale, drawn, worried.

"Jyn," he says quietly, and she swallows hard, nods to acknowledge that she's not quite so high up in he clouds. He keeps eye contact as he reaches behind her and puts the stormtrooper helmet in her hands. "Someone is trying to get in."

"Okay," she replies, fitting it back onto her head just before he does the same with his. "Yeah."

It's unsettling, watching Cassian disappear behind the skull-like mask.

It feels like a sign, of some sort, a kind of premonition, but she can't know whether or not to worry about it. In her current state, everything seems threatening, everything seems to portend doom.

Cassian speaks to the troopers with no trace of an accent, sounds exactly like one of them, explains that they've been in here, monitoring the cameras and trying to gain some feed on the intruders. "The droids locked the door," he says. "We had no idea. My apologies."

"You're relieved of duty," the trooper says, and Cassian salutes. After a half-second, Jyn manages a passable salute as well, and they leave the relative safety of the control room for the hostile halls.

The walls shine like chrome, silver, a mirrored finish reflecting two skeletons, marching, dead men walking, and it's what they are, really.

Dead men walking, breathing on borrowed time.

Her father's ghost seems to trail behind her. Lyra is nowhere to be found.

.

Luke and Han can take off the stormtrooper uniforms; Leia and Bodhi are stuck with their garbage-clothing, although it mollifies Bodhi’s irritation somewhat to see that Luke’s hair is still wet and absolutely _reeking_ , and Chewie’s feet are damp with muck. Ironically, out of all of them, Han is the only one who came out of the trash compactor remotely clean.

It’s enough to make Bodhi believe that karma doesn’t exist.

“If we can just avoid anymore _female_ advice,” Han drawls, handing Luke a blaster, “we might be able to get out of here.”

“I trust her a lot more than I trust you,” Bodhi mutters, but only Leia hears him. She gives him a smile, which turns acidic when she looks at Han.

“I don’t know who you are or where you came from,” she says, voice deathly calm, “but from now on, you’ll do as I tell you, okay?”

Han looks affronted; Luke and Bodhi exchange a glance, which says everything he thinks needs saying -- that is, _I am completely on-board with doing whatever she tells us to do_ (although Bodhi doubts that he and Luke have the same motives for doing so.)

“Listen, your worshipfulness,” Han growls, stepping entirely closer to Leia than is necessary, “Let’s get one thing straight, I take orders from one person: _me!_ ”

“Well, it’s a wonder you’re still alive,” she counters, stalking forward. “Will somebody get this big, walking carpet out of my way?”

Han looks around at the two of them incredulously. “Can you believe this?” he asks, and Luke just shrugs so he looks to Bodhi for support, which Bodhi is _extremely_ disinclined to give.

“How are you?” he says, deadpan, and Han shuts up.

.

The droids move slowly, and they shouldn’t be seen to run, anyway, so they’re left to walk through the halls toward the hangar. Nobody pays them much attention, a pair of troopers with a couple of droids; a squad of eight or so stormtroopers runs by, and Cassian catches snippets of, “We think they’re on level five and -- “ but if they’re right about the other team’s location, he has no idea.

Jyn seems more or less clear-headed, but her limp is starting to reassert itself. The stim might be wearing off. They’re not known for lasting very long, and he didn’t give her much, but she should be able to make it out of here, assuming that the others get to the hangar quickly. 

He wishes he had a chrono, but he guesses their ten minutes is almost up. But if the other team has been discovered and held up on level five, it means they’ll be running late, if they can make it at all.

He can’t shake the feeling that something is following them, but every time he looks behind him, there’s nobody there. It's probably just paranoia. Everyone is looking for Leia and a wookie, a floor above them.

“All right,” he murmurs, standing in the entryway. The _Millennium Falcon_ is sitting right where they left her, open and inviting. He gestures to the droids. “Get to the ship. If anyone asks, say you were called in to run a diagnostic scan on the ship’s computers.”

“Yes, sir,” Threepio replies.

“I can’t believe this is working,” Jyn mutters, sounding less amazed than apprehensive, and Cassian shakes his head. _It hasn’t worked yet_ , he wants to say, _and something is wrong, something is coming_.

He looks around, but the halls are more or less empty -- a cleaning droid passes by, and a maintenance worker, muttering about shoddy circuitry and bad software.

He tells himself it's just paranoia.

.

“You came in _that_ thing?” Leia asks, glancing down into the hangar a level below, and then back to Han. “You’re braver than I thought.”

“Nice,” Han snaps. “Come on.”

They make it down a few more halls, and are about to get into a stairwell, when the shooting starts from another direction. Han and Chewie start shooting back, while running desperately, and by the time they get to a less blaster-filled hallway, they’ve lost Luke and Leia.

“I think they went the other way,” Bodhi says, cursing himself for ending up on the wrong side of the fork in the path. He’d much rather be with Luke and the princess.

“Of course they did,” Han mutters. “Can you shoot?”

“Badly,” he replies, looking around. What they need is a way to distract all the stormtroopers, keep them off their backs, since Han and Chewie can shoot back until their blasters overheat, and even if every single bolt hits true, they’ll never take out all the units on the floor. He spots something promising on the other side of the hallway: a door marked MAINTENANCE. Maintenance closets will have circuit breakers, which he can use to mess up the electrical system for the floor, buy them some time. “Cover me,” he tells Han, and Han gives him a confused, incredulous look, but provides cover fire anyway.

Sure enough, inside the maintenance closet is the circuit breaker box, which makes exactly one thing today that has gone in Bodhi's favor.

There aren’t any labels -- because of _course_ there aren’t -- but the main switch is usually the very top one, or off to the side on its own, and there’s a nice little red switch that’s sitting separate from all the rest. Even if it isn’t the main breaker, it’s red and big and separate, which means it does something important, and is probably pretty critical, something the engineer really didn't want to be pulled except in case of emergency.

So of course, Bodhi pulls it.

.

“They said ten minutes,” Cassian hisses, and Jyn seems to waver against the wall. The stim is definitely starting to wear off, but she’s still holding onto her blaster, so it’ll have to suffice. He glances behind him again, that awful creeping feeling getting worse. “Where _are_ they?”

They’ll get the tractor beam back in service any moment now, and the droids said they had delayed the scan fifteen minutes. If Luke and Bodhi’s team doesn’t get here soon, they may not have a choice but to take the plans and leave without them; he has no idea where the tractor beam’s mechanism is, if there’s even any point to _trying_ to wait for Ben to join them. They're out of time. They need to leave _now_.

He hears the footsteps before he hears the breathing.

“Maybe they -- “ Jyn starts, and then freezes. He can’t see her expression, but he _can_ see what’s reflected in her helmet:

Darth Vader, walking up behind him, cape billowing.

 _Oh_ , he thinks, somewhat distantly. _That explains it_.

.

Han yells from outside the door when he pulls the red switch and all the lights go out.

Bodhi rolls his eyes, wants to yell back, _the whole point of shutting off the lights is to hide us, you nerfherder!_ But that would be wrong. And also hypocritical.

“Come on,” he snaps, closing the door behind him and catching Han by the sleeve, right before the emergency lights come on, a haunting red. “That should unlock all the doors.”

“Did you just shut off power to the whole station?” Han asks, running alongside him in the darkness.

“Just this floor, but it’ll buy us some time.”

Lights behind them, blaster fire, but not getting any closer. If the way Luke talked about his helmet is any indication, the stormtroopers’ vision was already compromised, so in the dim red light, they’re completely useless. They make it to the stairwell before any of the squads find their way in the dark.

The hangar is one floor beneath them, and they take the stairs two at a time (or, in Chewie’s case, five at a time), all-but crashing into Luke and Leia as soon as they open the door.

“There you are!” Han cries. “How’d you get here?”

“We took another route,” Leia answers, glancing sidelong at Luke.

“We’re almost there,” Luke mutters, and then, into his comm. “Threepio, do you copy?”

“Yes, sir,” Threepio’s voice responds. “The tractor beam has been disabled. Artoo and I are at the ship. Cassian and Jyn are waiting for you.”

“What about Ben?”

“I have not heard from Master Obi-Wan, sir.”

Luke makes a noise in the back of his throat, sounding worried, expression serious, but he doesn’t say anything about it. “We’ll be there shortly, Threepio.”

.

Jyn cannot breathe.

Her senses haven’t exactly been reliable in the past half-hour, but she’s pretty certain that she’s not hallucinating Darth Vader walking up behind Cassian. Even her worst fevered hallucinations couldn’t have conjured up the sound of his breathing -- so like Saw, the last time she saw him, and yet so much worse -- or the weight of his footsteps rattling in her skull.

Darth Vader. Here. Now.

This is how they will die. This is where. She sees Galen reflected in the walls, reaching out to embrace her, to bring her to join him, but he's fading, beckoning.

_No!_

Cassian freezes, expression blank because of the mask, but he has to see it in hers, he _has_ to know, he knows. He turns, executes a flawless salute, standing directly in front of her and blocking her from Vader’s view. It’s a kind gesture, and useless. “Lord Vader,” he says, in a crisp, almost-too-perfect Coruscanti accent. “We were holding this hangar, in case the rebels -- “

“Do not attempt to lie to me,” Vader booms, his voice echoing like a thunderclap, deep like an earthquake shattering a world to pieces. The black-gloved hand reaches out as if to choke the air, and Cassian convulses as though actually being choked, and is lifted off his feet by an unseen force.

 _Trust the Force,_  Lyra's voice implores from somewhere behind her or in her head. 

She reacts without thinking, raising her blaster even though she’s not confident in her aim right now -- Cassian would rather be shot than submit to Vader anyway -- but Vader raises another hand and her blaster is ripped from her hands, dragging her forward several steps with it, before Vader flicks his hand as though casting off an unwanted substance, and she hits the wall, hard, crying out and seeing stars as she crumples to the ground.

She tries to stand, to fight -- Cassian is still choking, she can’t see his face, but he’s still struggling so he’s still alive -- but Vader uses the Force to hold her down.

“Now,” he says, if it can be called speech. “You, rebel spy, will lead me to the plans.”

Vader eases up on the choking to give Cassian a chance to speak, but all he says is, “ _Burn in hell_.”

It’s stupid, it’s defiant, it’s the worst possible thing he could have said right now, and yet she can’t think of anything she would rather he say.

Vader clenches his fist and Cassian’s whole body reacts as though electrified, but he makes no sound. Probably, he can’t breathe; she struggles against the weight on her back, holding her down, but she can’t -- she can’t get out from under it, it’s crushing her, squeezing the air out of her lungs, but Cassian will _die_ \-- the premonition, the skull, but it was just the fever, it wasn't _real_ , she refuses to believe -- she _has_ to get up, she _has_ to fight -- Vader glances at her and presses his hand down again, forcing her back down just when she was starting make headway -- Cassian will die, she can’t let him die, _it can’t end like this_ \--

And then noise: the voice of a young man, painfully naive and alight with righteousness, the sound of a lightsaber extending.

“Hey!” Luke Skywalker yells, and Vader glances sideways at him. “Let them go!”

At first, Vader doesn’t give a damn about Luke, although he tilts his head quizzically. “And who are _you?_ ” he asks, sounding almost bored.

“I’m Luke Skywalker!” he yells, and, abruptly, the weight is gone from her back and Cassian falls to the ground, as Vader whirls around to face Luke. “You killed my father, but I’m not gonna let you kill my _friends!_ ”

His expression is twisted with anger, true rage, and it’s terrible on his face, unwelcome there on kind-hearted and sweet Luke. She recalls, distantly, him saying that he was nice to her because she never gave him a reason not to be -- it’s strange, then, to see what happens when someone _does_ give him a reason not to be.

She wrenches off her helmet so she can breathe, and crawls toward Cassian, who has also pulled off his helmet and is on his hands and knees, coughing, as Bodhi and a small woman who must be the princess run up to them. 

“ _Skywalker?_ ” Vader repeats, something like shock in his tone, physically recoiling. The mask hides any expression on his face, but his voice gives away horror. She honestly didn’t believe the man capable of such an emotion. “The child _lived?_ ”

“We have to get out of here,” Bodhi says, pulling Jyn to her feet as the princess helps Cassian, asking him over and over if he’s okay, but he doesn’t respond.

“Luke -- “ she starts, but someone else yells -- Han, panicking, as he stands on the ramp to the cargo bay, waving for them to join him.

“Luke, _get the hell out of there!_ ”

(The arrival of Darth Vader turned this entire mission into a nightmare for all of them.)

“We can’t leave him,” she gasps. The princess looks at her and then back to Luke, her expression anguished, torn.

Luke -- Luke pulled a lightsaber on Darth Vader, the most terrifying sentient creature in the galaxy, to save them, just because he called them his friends. Jyn won’t leave him behind. She left Saw behind, she left Galen behind, she left Chirrut and Baze behind, she _won’t_ leave Luke. She can’t have more ghosts haunting her. Luke is a brave fool and a naive idealist, and Jyn doesn’t know anybody else in the galaxy who still has the luxury of being either of those things -- nobody else in the galaxy would have attacked Darth Vader for people he’s known for two days.

Luke can’t be left behind here. She’ll die before she’ll leave him behind.

For some reason, Vader doesn’t immediately attack, seemingly too shocked to see Luke alive ( _you killed my father_ , he said, Vader is probably surprised that he didn’t wipe out the whole family, the bastard), and Luke goes for it, running with the lightsaber held high, foolishly, with all the reckless bravery of a teenager who’s never been in a fight before and has no clue what he's doing but truly believes in it, and --

( -- she hates that she can’t condemn him for it, she can’t yell at him for being stupid and reckless because he’s just saved them, given them the opening they were about to die without, done something so dumb and so kind and so brave -- )

\-- then another force catches Luke before he can reach Vader and shoves him toward the ship. He crashes to the ground right in front of Bodhi.

Ben, hand outstretched, and just before he schools his face into impassivity, there’s a flicker of fear there. The old Jedi was truly afraid for Luke, but too good at being a Jedi to show it.

“Luke, go with them,” Ben says, voice even and measured, and Vader turns to him with sharp movements. Right, former master, he probably hates Ben, who stands for everything he used to be but isn’t anymore.

“Master -- !” Luke starts, but Ben cuts him off.

“You cannot win this fight!” he cries, extending his lightsaber, eyes on Vader. “Go! All of you! _Go!_ ”

There’s no getting Ben back onto the ship with them. He’s going to die here, but before Jyn can run back to help him -- she almost does, without thinking, she really almost _does_ go back for Ben, because Ben spoke fondly of her mother and brought Lyra back to her for a few shining moments, because Ben will train Luke to save the whole galaxy like he just tried to save all of them and they _need_ Luke, they need people with Luke’s fire and hope and drive and compassion, they _need_ the _Jedi_ \-- Chewbacca grabs her and lifts her bodily off the ground, carrying her back toward the ship.

She can’t hear what Ben is saying, but their fight seems… subdued. Like neither of them are committed to the duel, but of the two of them, Vader is the more aggressive one, while Ben defends. Buys them time. They’re halfway up the ramp into the cargo bay when Ben turns to them, locks eyes with Luke, then sheathes his saber and takes one step back.

It’s over in one swing of Vader’s red lightsaber, but the robe falls to the ground, empty, and Ben is gone.

She’s screaming. So is Luke.

Han is already in the cockpit, the princess is helping Cassian into the ship, Chewie is physically carrying Jyn, Bodhi is dragging Luke, who looks ravaged and torn-up and angry, so angry, spitting mad -- and Ben is gone.

The last of the Jedi is gone.

(But not really, no, because Luke is still here with his lightsaber and his hope and his skill with the Force, and the Force is what brought them through this, and maybe she’s hallucinating, maybe it’s the fever coming back or her crashing from the stim, but she could swear she hears the old Jedi telling her to run now and fight later.)

They take off, into hyperspace, back to Yavin IV and the Resistance and normality, but Jyn thinks nothing will never be the same. 

.

Jyn refuses to go back to Han’s room, and he sort of doesn’t blame her; everyone is reeling, everyone is in shock. The last few hours have been rough on all of them, and they’re all quiet, twisted up in their own heads -- Leia has Alderaan on her back, Luke has Ben, Jyn has Jedha and Eadu and the last remnants of her mother that Ben had given her back, and Cassian has --

Cassian has the sensation of Vader’s phantom arm holding him off the ground, choking the breath out of him, as he is helpless to fight it or help Jyn or help the Rebellion or do _anything at all_ except watch his vision dim. He's _never_ helpless, he's always got _something_ up his sleeve, some trick, some ploy, some way to get out of whatever situation he's in, but -- there was nothing, just… nothing in his skillset, nothing in his arsenal, nothing in his knowledge, nothing that could stand up against Darth Vader. 

He'd heard Jyn hit the wall, and he'd been completely unable to do anything, even to call out to her. 

Everyone who’s seen Darth Vader and lived to tell about it -- which is not many people -- has spoken of how terrifying he is, how unstoppable, something you _don’t_ fight, _ever,_  you just _run_ when you see him coming, run as far and as fast as you can and it doesn’t matter who you leave behind; once Darth Vader shows up, he's heard, it’s every man for himself.

He never believed them before, thought surely they were exaggerating.

But Luke didn’t know that, couldn’t know that -- all Luke knew was that people he (for whatever reason) calls his friends were in trouble. And he reacted. Foolishly, recklessly, and if Ben hadn’t shown up, probably fatally… but he’d come running toward the galaxy’s nightmare, armed only with bravery and a weapon he barely knew which end of to hold, to save them.

 _Did you really believe you could win?_ he had asked Luke, once they were on the ship and moving. He'd looked so young then, and shaken, but when he replied, his voice was steady and defiant --

_Somebody had to do something. It didn't matter if I could win. I had to try._

And so he'd attacked, like an idiot, and saved them, like a Jedi, and…

…and Darth Vader had let them go.

At first, he had thought that it was because of Ben, because he’d been distracted, but Ben had died -- died, or disappeared, or whatever it was -- before they were moving. Vader could have stopped them, but he didn’t.

There’s only one reason why.

In a way, he's grateful for it: it's something else to focus on. 

“Princess,” he says abruptly, and the princess looks up from where she’s been sitting by Luke. “Are we going directly to Base One?”

“Yes,” she replies, and he shakes his head.

“They’ll be following us.”

“You don’t know that,” Luke says, but uncertainly, and Cassian glances at him.

“We didn’t escape, they let us go. Why else would they?”

Leia looks thoughtful for a moment, around the assembled group. “Captain Andor is right,” she muses slowly. “They wanted the location of the Rebel Base. It makes sense that they would follow us. I can’t imagine they would pass up the opportunity, even if our escape wasn’t planned.”

He nods. “I’ll tell Han to take evasive -- “

“No.”

She says the word firmly, and it drops to the floor with the gravity of a black hole, sucking all the air out of the room with it. Everyone looks up at the sentence, a declaration of total war in one syllable.

“No,” Leia repeats, standing and nodding to Chewie. “Let them come. I need to contact High Command.”

“They’ve gone dark,” he says, as Chewie leaves, presumably to get some kind of transmitter. “No responses on any frequency.”

“They’ll respond to me,” she replies, then looks at Bodhi. “How fast is the Death Star?” she asks. “How much time will we have before they arrive?”

Bodhi winces. “I don't know," he says. "I think it was supposed to be at least as fast as a star destroyer."

“How much _time_ , Bodhi?”

“A day, maybe?” he answers. “Give or take.”

Leia nods slowly, thoughtfully.

Only a moment later, Chewie has returned with a transmitter, followed by a confused-looking Han.

“I thought you said the rebels went dark?” he says, giving Cassian a quizzical glance, but Cassian shrugs as Leia sets the transmitter down on the table and takes a seat, before keying in some unfamiliar code. Of course, top brass has their own frequencies above even his security clearance. It’s probably Bail’s code. 

“This is Princess Leia Organa,” she says into the microphone. “Confirm transmission received.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then -- staticky, sounding far-away -- the voice of Davits Draven.

“Transmission received.”

Leia takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “I am in possession of the plans,” she says, with deliberate care. “My ship was captured and I was taken aboard the Death Star; however, I was rescued by a group of people working with Obi-Wan Kenobi and three surviving members of _Rogue One_. We are en route to Base One, projected to arrive in approximately twelve hours. That is the good news.”

“Surviving members of _Rogue One?_ ” Draven repeats, sounding surprised, but doesn’t press. “What is the bad news?”

It takes Leia a moment to compose herself to respond; it’s the first time she’s given any indication of the loss she’s suffered today. “Alderaan is destroyed,” she says, articulating carefully, and if her hands weren’t shaking, she would appear completely serene, as though commenting on the weather. “My mother and father are dead. The reinforcements my father intended to bring from the Alderaan system are not coming. We are being followed by the Death Star.”

There’s a moment of silence, before Draven says, fervently, “Your highness, I advise evasive action.”

“I did not call for advice, thank you, General,” Leia snaps coldly, and Jyn raises an eyebrow, glancing at Cassian, who only manages to hide his surprise with years of practice. “Immediately upon my arrival at the base, I expect to meet with analysts who will examine the plans I carry with me, and we will require a medical team to attend to an injured crewmember. Our ship is significantly faster than the Death Star. We have approximately twenty-four hours before it will arrive, and I want every ship with a gun and a pilot prepared to deploy the moment that the Death Star reaches our longest-range sensors.”

“Your highness, I cannot approve such rash action,” Draven replies. “Our fleet is in no condition to engage the Death Star. We must evacuate.”

“The circumstances will not improve,” Leia counters. “There are no reinforcements coming. We must engage them now, while we have surprise on our side. We will not be afforded another opportunity such as this.”

“I cannot condone -- “ Draven starts, but Leia cuts him off.

“I am not asking what you would condone, General Draven, I am giving you orders.”

There’s another silence, stretching thin in the air around them. Finally, Draven replies.

“Understood.”

“Ending transmission now,” Leia says, and cuts the signal without waiting for a response.

“So,” Luke starts, shattering the ringing silence, “we’re gonna fight?”

Leia nods.

“Either we destroy it tomorrow, or they destroy us,” she replies, standing up, straight-backed and proud. “I will not watch another planet fall.”

He looks down at Jyn, who looks from Leia to him, and gives him a tired shrug. "Let's finish it, then," she says softly, and he nods.

_Either we destroy it, or they destroy us._

Tomorrow.


	7. crucify the insincere tonight

and if you believe there’s not a chance tonight, tonight, so bright  
we’ll _crucify the insincere tonight_ , we’ll make things right, we’ll feel it all tonight

.

.

She's standing in the old woman’s little stockroom, waiting for the news; the woman looks nervous, keeps taking deep breaths, looking up at her and then down and the anywhere else, anywhere but her eyes. _I'm sorry_ , she says, after what seems like an eternity of evasion. _They have... pulled out of the system. They are not coming back_.

 _What?_ Jyn asks, the words known but unknown, heard but not understood. _What do you mean, pulled out of the system? They know I'm here._

 _Yes_ , the old woman says. _Yes, I'm sure they do_.

 _What do you mean_ , she asks again, even though she knows. The words can't be true, it doesn't -- it just doesn't make sense. _Why would they leave me here?_

 _I… couldn’t say_ , the woman replies, quietly anguished, maybe angry that they left this job to her. _Sometimes people simply… do things, and you never get a reason why._

 _But I_ \-- she starts, thoughts stumbling in her head, heart stuttering against her ribs. Something in her can’t seem to start, can’t seem to -- can’t wrap itself around this, can’t accept. _I've done everything they've ever asked of me. What did I do wrong?_

 _I don't know_ , the woman says, opening the door. _I can't answer that_. _Nothing in this room is valuable._

 _That's not good enough!_ she screams, voice cracking, but the old woman leaves anyway, head bowed, and Jyn is alone, alone, alone. _That's not good enough!_ she cries again, grabbing the nearest thing to hand -- a bottle of cheap liquor -- and throwing it against the door as hard as she can. _Answer me!_

Alone, alone, alone. On Takodana, on Dathomir, on Lothal, on Tatooine, on -- and never a good reason why.

 _Are we not still friends?_ Saw’s voice croaks from somewhere all around her, and she wants to scream at him and rip out all his metal pieces until he's a man again, or nothing, scream over and over _no, no, no, because you left me and you never even said goodbye_ and _you were never my friend, you were my father, and I thought I was your daughter but you left_. But she's been alone for so long, and he was the only real father whose face she can clearly remember, so she tries to find him in spite of everything, to save him from the rubble --

She follows the sound of his breathing, turns a corner and finds Darth Vader, reaching out a hand to choke the life out of her, and a scream of terror -- she hasn't screamed in as long as she can remember, she knows better than to scream, has always known better than to scream, but for some reason Darth Vader brings out the childish terror in her -- wrenches itself out of her throat, and she runs, shoves open the doors and out into the daylight, and --

The world shudders around her as the Death Star fires, bright poison green, and she's standing on the catwalk and the man in white is laughing and he fires his blaster, a white-hot bolt of light, into her chest, and it's so -- it's so in character, so in keeping with the man who murdered her mother and murdered Cassian, that they're both about to be vaporized but he's going to kill her himself anyway, and --

\-- the sound of Baze’s voice, half-forgotten, _little sister_ \--

\-- and she's falling, falling, and Cassian reaches out to catch her but he's too far away, and she sees something like fear in his eyes --

“Wake up!”

She jolts awake, gasping for breath against the tightness in her chest, which her muddled memory screams is a blaster shot, a killing blow -- but --

It's probably just panic, slow to fade.

She blinks rapidly several times in the dim light, tries to orient herself. A cot, a small room in a moving ship, metal parts, familiar -- _Han Solo_ , she thinks, _I'm back in Han Solo’s quarters_. And Cassian’s hands are on her shoulders, steady. Her face is wet, hands shaking, throat raw.

“It was just a nightmare,” Cassian says quietly. But it wasn’t; not all of it. Not most of it, not really, except in the way that her memories usually are.

“Sorry,” she manages to mumble, but he shrugs it off. “How far out are we?”

“A few hours, still,” he replies, and it occurs to her that she doesn’t remember getting down here, to Han’s cot. The last thing she remembers is nodding off in the common area, while Bodhi and Leia and Luke discussed the best way to go about launching an attack on the Death Star.

An obvious answer strikes her, and she dismisses it. It was probably Chewie, come to think of it. The wookie seems to have taken her injury personally, taken her under his wing, and, for being so intimidating, wookies are known for having exceptionally big hearts. So, most likely. Probably. It was Chewie.

It’s freezing down here, or she’s running a fever again, or both.

Cassian presses the back of his hand to her forehead, then makes a face before rooting through the bag she’d honestly forgotten about in all the shuffling to get onto the ship. So -- fever.

She doesn’t know what to say; there’s a lot to choose from, from “thank you for everything you’ve done for me” to “what do we do now?” to “what the hell even is Darth Vader?” to “I’m sorry for whatever I said while drugged” --

There’s too much to say, and so she can’t come up with anything.

What she lands on, then, is less than stellar, or well-rehearsed:

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, and he glances at her quizzically, so she continues, wincing at herself. “For being so much trouble.”

He seems to hesitate, watching her carefully, before he sighs. “Just don’t do it again,” he says finally. “We’re in this _together_ , I need to know if you’re hurt.”

The way he says ‘together’ tugs at some long-forgotten heartstring, and she tries to ignore it, the old woman’s words still echoing in her memory -- _they're not coming back_ \-- and the rest of it, what she'd said later about closure, moving on…

(That had been her first drink, she recalls -- the Partisans could so rarely afford alcohol, and Saw was too paranoid to ever let his guard down enough to drink, a trait he'd passed on to her, but the woman had sat her down at the bar and poured her a shot and she'd drained it like a hardened drunk -- two shots, one right after the other, and the woman had placed a hand on hers and said,

 _Sometimes you don't get answers, you don't get closure. You just move on, and one morning, somewhere far away from now, you'll wake up and it won't define you anymore_.)

She takes the pills Cassian gives her with the water he offers, and -- it's kind of him, really, kinder than he has to be, to care for her like this. Even Saw never cared for her like this, worried over her, fussed about her health and gave her medicine that won't do anything but make her feel better. Maybe Lyra and Galen did, but if so, she was too young to remember.

 _You can't get used to_ _it_ , part of her screams, but --

 _We’re in this together_ , and _one morning, somewhere far away from now --_

It's not that morning, not yet, although she’s starting to think that maybe she’s seeing some light on the horizon, maybe…

But even so.

“I won’t,” she promises.

.

After Jyn crashes and Cassian takes her back down to Han’s cot, and Luke and Leia have both fallen asleep, not quite touching, in the common area, and even the droids have shut themselves down to conserve power, Bodhi goes up to the cockpit to sit with Han and Chewie.

Now that things have calmed down, he’s getting hit all over again with the reality of the Death Star.

Alderaan is gone, wiped out of the galaxy, so much space dust.

He enabled this.

He ferried the kyberite ore, he ran supply missions, he supported their drilling on Jedha -- and while, yes, they could have easily found someone to replace him if he’d left, or never joined, it’s still… he could have done like Galen, in retrospect, he could have sabotaged from the inside. He could have -- he could have done something.

But it had never really seemed like a big deal, not until Galen had told him what they were building, and even then, it all seemed… too big for him, too heavy, too much. He had to be encouraged to defect, even after learning that they were building a planet-killer -- he -- he was always such a coward.

Alderaan is gone, and he was complicit in its destruction, too little and too late to save two billion people.

Leia had thanked him, before they started talking about how to deal with the Death Star, she had taken his hand in both of hers and thanked him for bringing the message, for giving them hope, and he’d been unable to tell her the truth, that he was -- he was a coward, he could have done more, he -- he didn’t deserve her thanks, not when her planet and all of her people were vaporized now.

 _Bodhi is the best of us_ , Cassian had said, and Jyn had murmured her agreement, and --

They were wrong, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Han will understand, and honestly, it bothers him on a fundamental level that he would be looking to Han for anything other than someone to punch in the face, but Han will get what it’s like to feel like an imposter among the heroes.

Both Han and Chewie glance at him when he walks in and sits, uncomfortably, in one of the chairs behind the pilot and co-pilot seats.

“You should be sleeping,” Han says seriously. “There’s still a few hours left before we get there.”

He shakes his head. “Can’t sleep,” he mutters, gesturing vaguely at his head. “Too much…”

“Yeah,” Han agrees, letting out a long breath. “It’s been a rough day.”

“That’s an understatement,” he replies darkly, and picks at his clothes with no purpose. Chewie growls, and Han looks from his co-pilot to Bodhi.

“He says you seem upset,” he translates. “Something on your mind?”

He doesn’t look up. “Yeah,” he replies. “I…” he pauses, hesitates, tries to talk himself out of it, but he needs to tell _someone_ that he’s a goddamned fraud. “I’m not a hero,” he says finally, with a desperate, false laugh, and looks up. “I’m not like them, this isn’t easy. I just got involved to pass on a message, I don’t… I’ve never done anything like this before.”

Han turns his seat around, seems to mull over it for a moment, long enough that Bodhi starts to feel a little stupid(er). But then Han sighs. “I don’t even know what makes a person a hero,” he says finally, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “But I don’t think it’s easy for anybody. You passed on your message, right?” he asks, and when Bodhi nods, he shrugs. “So why are you still here?”

He opens his mouth to reply, loses his train of thought, and then picks it up again somewhere else. “On Scarif, I… I sent a message to the Rebel fleet, and then the only thing left to do was get off the planet,” he explains. “You know, survive. I picked up Cassian and Jyn, and then we ended up on Tatooine, and… it’s just been one thing after another. I’m just trying to survive.”

“So, when we get back to their base, what are you gonna do?”

This brings him up short.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else for me to go.”

“Well,” Han says, drawing the word out and leaning back in his seat. “You’re welcome to come with us. If you wanted to. I could use someone who knows the ins and outs of the Empire, that’s all.”

“No,” he answers, before he can think of it, but Han doesn’t look offended. “I can’t just walk away.”

“Why not?” he challenges, making a face. “You and me, we’re not soldiers. Why fight a war?”

“Because…” he starts, then falters, looks away. “Because I enabled this,” he says in a low voice. “I helped them build it. Alderaan is on me.”

“No,” Han counters, “it’s on _them_. Whoever’s in charge of that thing, the Emperor, it’s on them. You just did your job.”

He pauses, thinks it over, and then shakes his head. “That’s not a good enough excuse,” he replies quietly. “ _Most_ of the Imperial forces are just doing their jobs, it doesn’t make it any better for the people they hurt. I could have found a different job. I could have -- I could have done other things. But I didn’t. And that’s on me.”

“So, what,” Han says, waving a hand airily, “you’re gonna use the Rebellion to redeem yourself? Kid, the only person you need to forgive you is you,” he adds, crossing his arms. “Look, I’ve done a lot I’m not proud of, for a lot worse reasons than a steady income and food on the table. You wanna be a rebel,” he adds, with a sort of deliberate flippancy, “fine, be a rebel. But don’t do it ‘cause you feel like you have to, to -- to atone for not caring before. What’s done is done.”

Chewie makes a noise that sounds vaguely admonishing, and Bodhi looks at him quizzically, so Han translates.

“He said you shouldn’t blame yourself for what somebody else did with you,” he says, and Chewie growls again. Han sighs. “They used you,” he translates, “you’re as much a victim as anybody else in the galaxy.”

“Thanks,” he mutters, looking away, “but I think Alderaan is the real victim here.”

“Didn’t they destroy Jedha?” Han counters, and he flinches. “You knew anybody there?”

Bodhi can’t look at him. “I was born there,” he replies quietly, voice faint. “My whole family was there.”

Han pauses for a long moment, before letting out a long sigh. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds truly sincere. “Look, I get it,” he adds, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “You wanna do something about it. That’s great, but it’s still not your fault, or your fight. You don’t _have_ to do this. They’ll be fine without you.”

Bodhi looks up, and in that moment, it suddenly becomes clear: Han isn’t trying to convince _Bodhi_ of anything.

He’s reminded, abruptly, of himself the first time Galen had approached him: _wow, that’s awful, but it’s way above my pay grade. I can’t be a defector, I’ve got a sick father to support, my sister’s about to have a baby and they’re so poor --_

They’ll be fine without you, Han says, because he _doesn’t_ believe it but he thinks that if he says it enough he can make it be true.

And he remembers what Galen had said to him.

“Somebody has to do it,” he says, almost dreamlike, like he’s both in the _Millennium Falcon_ and in the mess hall at Eadu, three weeks ago. “Why not us? We can do right by ourselves, make it right. Why shouldn’t we try?”

“Because we’ll die,” Han replies, like it’s obvious, and Bodhi shakes his head.

“Everybody dies,” he says. “Look, I get it,” he goes on, mirroring Han’s tone. “You care, but you’ve got your own problems to deal with, you can’t fix everyone else’s. You wanna walk away, fine, I don’t blame you, but you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what you could have done if you’d stayed.”

Chewie growls again, and even though Bodhi doesn’t know the language, the tone says something to the effect of _he’s got a point_ , and Han scowls.

“That doesn’t matter,” he snaps at his co-pilot, and then, to Bodhi: “I’m already sticking my neck out enough, just taking you to the rebel base.” He turns his chair back around, shutting him out. “I don’t have the luxury of caring about this the way the rest of you do,” he mutters, but he doesn’t sound convinced.

.

To General Draven’s credit, when they land on Yavin IV, there’s a medical team ready with a stretcher and supplies, as well as three intelligence officers waiting to receive the plans and anything Leia knows. Cassian had half-expected to be arrested.

“Captain Andor,” Draven says, holding out a hand to shake. “I expect to see you at 1700 hours for debriefing. We’ll discuss where to go from there.”

Ah. So that’s how they’re going to play it: the “let’s all just pretend you had orders to do this thing and the higher-ups will quietly take credit for what you had to risk everything they wouldn’t dare to accomplish” card. It makes him twitch with suppressed anger.

Still. He’s been in this too long, he’s in this too deep, and anyway it’s his clearance (or maybe, come to think of it, Leia’s) that’s getting Jyn high-priority treatment, so he’ll work with it. Play along. Be the good soldier boy, following every order, even if it makes him sick. It leaves an acrid taste in his mouth, but he salutes anyway.

“Yes, sir,” he replies, making perfect eye contact with Draven’s forehead. Draven isn’t foolish enough to not know, to not be ashamed of doing this to them, to _Cassian_ , which might be why he doesn’t push him any further; Davits Draven is many things, but pragmatic is foremost among them. It’s always been one of the things Cassian has admired about the man.

He feels eyes burning on his neck, and when he glances back, Leia is watching him calculatingly, expression unreadable even to him. She nods regally, and then leaves with the officers.

Whatever she’s seen in him, he won’t know until she chooses to make her own moves, whatever they may be.

Bodhi and Luke start to drift off toward the hangar, to be assigned X-Wings -- he wasn’t sure if Bodhi was going to agree to pilot one for the assault on the Death Star, and from the expression on his face, neither was Bodhi… but Luke Skywalker has a way of making you think that anything is possible, even surviving the unsurvivable. He catches Bodhi before he leaves, and murmurs, “Good luck. I’ll keep you posted on -- on Jyn.”

Bodhi nods. “Thanks. I’m sure she’ll be fine. Once this is -- “ he hesitates, swallows hard, glances at Luke, shining with purpose and certainty, “ -- once this is over, I’ll meet you in the medbay. As a visitor,” he adds, with uncharacteristic confidence that his expression belies, “not a patient.”

Cassian pauses for a half-second, then sighs, and pulls Bodhi into a tight hug.

There are some things you can’t go through with another person, without becoming friends. Bodhi has earned a rare show of affection and solidarity from him, and he seems grateful for it, arms tight and expression grim.

Bodhi’s odds in the upcoming firefight aren’t great, but he’s an excellent pilot, he knows what he’s doing, and he’s not stupid enough to take hopeless risks.

(On the other hand, he’s here, which is something Cassian has always privately believed requires you to be a special kind of stupid, the kind that somehow thinks that one person, in a galaxy of trillions of souls, could ever make a difference. The kind of stupid he’s always been, the kind of stupid Galen Erso was, the kind of stupid Luke Skywalker is. Maybe you _have_ to be stupid. Maybe you have to think the objectively impossible can somehow be made possible, if you’ve got enough nerve. If you’ve got enough fire, you can burn anything.)

Bodhi’s odds may not be great, but they _are_ probably better than surviving Scarif and their recent liaison with the Death Star, so that’s something.

“You come back,” he says quietly, but only in the moment of contact. It’s not the kind of thing you say loudly at a time like this. Bodhi nods.

“We will,” he replies, and Cassian nods, gives him a half-smile.

“Not that this isn’t charming,” another voice cuts in, and Cassian feels the smile freeze on his face. Han. “But you _do_ owe me money.”

He doesn’t sound like he feels good about it, which is something. Luke looks affronted, but Cassian pulls out the rest of the credits.

“This is about so much more than _money_ ,” Luke says fervently, and Han makes a face.

“Yeah, but I’ve got debts of my own to pay,” he replies, looking slightly hunted, a little ashamed. “I’m not in this for the revolution, I’ve got enough stress in my life already. No offense,” he adds, but won’t look Luke in the eyes.

“I get it,” Cassian says, because he does, and Han even seems a little grateful to him for it, but Luke scoffs.

“We could use a good pilot like you, you’re turning your back on us,” he insists, but Han looks away. They won’t win this argument. Han has his own demons to deal with; there are a billion others like him in the galaxy, people who would be great assets to the Rebellion if they could ever be convinced to stand up for something, but they have their own battles in their own little candle-wick lives to attend to, and they won’t ever burn for anything brighter, anything bigger. People who believe that if they can keep their lives small, they can keep things under their control, and they’ll never, ever understand that they’ll end up just as dead as the rest of them, in the end, one way or another.

Either you die fighting for something you believe in, or you die for something stupid in some dingy bar, or you die of old age in some distant world -- the only common thread is, you die.

But Han won’t see it that way. Cassian has given up on dozens of potential rebels just like him.

“Attacking that battle station ain’t my idea of courage,” Han mutters, accepting the credits and still looking away. “It’s more like suicide.”

Luke nods several times, eyes alight. “Okay,” he growls, shrugging and taking a step away. “Take care of yourself, Han,” he continues, almost snarling. “I guess that’s what you’re best at, isn’t it?”

He starts to stalk off but Han calls out to them. “Hey, Luke, Bodhi,” he says, and they both half-turn. “May the Force be with you.”

Luke looks down, and then away, and walks away without replying; Han shuffles his feet awkwardly for a couple of seconds before going back to his ship. Bodhi and Cassian stay for another moment.

“He’ll come back,” Bodhi says finally, with a strange sort of certainty, and Cassian raises an eyebrow, hitches his bag up higher on his shoulder.

“You think so?” he challenges, making a face, but Bodhi shakes his head.

“He’ll come back,” he repeats. “Trust me. I know.”

“Why?”

Bodhi looks at him then, full in the face. “Because I took Galen’s message to Saw. Trust me,” he says again, and starts to follow Luke. “Han will come back.”

.

The wait for the Death Star to arrive is the most nerve-wracking fourteen hours of Bodhi’s life, which is honestly one hell of a feat.

Every pilot in the Rebellion is in the hangar, milling about, waiting; the anticipation and anxiety are thick as magma in the air, hot and heavy, high pressure, stifling. But there isn't really anywhere else to go. He wandered around for a little while, but Jyn is in bacta, for what the medics swear will be a very short immersion, and Cassian is in a debriefing that's way, way above Bodhi’s clearance, and Luke is in the hangar getting the feel of his X-Wing.

A few more pilots touch down -- after Leia’s order, explains one of them, a dark-skinned human woman with Lieutenant’s stripes, everyone who could return to base within eighteen hours had been recalled.

Even so, it’s a thin armada.

Admiral Raddus has been reported KIA, along with the entirety of the Blue Squadron, half of the Red Squadron, one of their two Hammerheads and its entire crew, and a smattering of others. All told, the Battle of Scarif essentially halved the Rebel fleet.

He sees what Draven meant, when he said they were in no condition to engage the Empire, but he also sees what Leia meant -- that fleet took nearly two decades to build, painstakingly, from scratch. They will not be able to rebuild it, not with the Death Star in action.

The time is now. There won’t _be_ a tomorrow for the Rebellion if they don’t fight today.

A month ago, Bodhi Rook would not have been caught dead in this hangar, this fight.

A month ago, Bodhi Rook was a reasonably-loyal Imperial pilot, just doing his job, from one small world to another, one small day to another, just looking forward to his next paycheck and the birth of his niece.

(She never got to come, he thinks suddenly, and the thought hits him like a punch to the gut -- she was still in her mother on Jedha, just days away from being born, and the Empire stole her first breath. It chokes him, and he tries not to focus on it. Not today. Tomorrow, if it comes, he can grieve. Finally, finally grieve.

The one way that the past two weeks has been kind is that he hasn’t had the time to dwell on it. It’s been one life-threatening engagement to another, always something bigger than the past and the dead that he has to deal with, and any sleep that's come has come on too hard after too long awake for nightmares. There’s been no time to feel pain.)

He’s sitting on the step to his X-Wing (Red Twelve) when the alarms start going off, and the hangar, as one, looks up at the klaxon, red and piercing.

“Red Squadron!” the leader -- Dreis, a survivor of Scarif -- calls out, and they all stand to attention; he catches Luke’s eye, and receives an encouraging nod and thumbs-up that he tries to return in spite of the bile rising in his throat. “Prepare to deploy! May the Force be with you!”

Bodhi takes a deep, deep breath, and mounts the steps into his ship.

.

The alarms wake Jyn up.

She’s in a brightly-lit room, with the sharp taste of bacta in her mouth, in an uncomfortable bed, the wet air thick with the scent of decay.

Yavin IV. Only a jungle could smell so dead and so alive at the same time.

She tries to sit up, and someone else’s hands help stabilize her.

“It’s all right,” Cassian Andor’s voice says. “You’re getting better.”

“Am I?” she breathes, and looks around. He’s standing now, but there’s no chair for him to be sitting in before, and the only other people in the medbay are a couple of unconscious soldiers and med-droids. “What’s going on?” she asks, and then remembers, a bit -- the Death Star, Leia’s orders, _tomorrow_. “It’s here?”

“That’s what the sirens mean,” Cassian answers, sighing and taking a seat near her feet. “It’s hit our long-range sensors. It should be coming out of hyperspace in a few minutes.”

She blinks, lets that sink in. It’s happening now, within the next half-hour, if that: either the Death Star will be destroyed, or the Rebellion will.

And she’s in a sickbed, with no one to blame for it but herself.

“Have they -- they’ve analyzed the plans, right?” she asks, stumbling over the words, a cold sort of sobriety settling into her head. Cassian nods.

“It’s a small target,” he answers, and relief floods through her, even though she never really doubted that it was there, it’s just -- it’s just that she’s so used to being disappointed by fathers, that a part of her held out for the worst. “But it’s there. Luke and Bodhi joined Red Squadron, they’re probably flying out now.”

“Shouldn’t you be with all the higher-ups?” she says quietly, and tacks on, to explain, “Captain?”

He pauses, glances away. “They offered me a place,” he admits, “but…”

She doesn’t reply, instead waiting for him to answer, and finally he sighs and runs a hand through his hair.

“If I’m gonna die today,” he says in a low voice, “I don’t wanna die with Draven and Mothma and a bunch of politicians.”

 _I’d rather die here with you_ , isn’t said but it’s implied, and something in her wrenches at this, twists and pulls and sucks the air out of her lungs.

Death has always been in the periphery of her life, but right now, looking it in the face at least as close as she did at Scarif, it… it’s ugly, up close like this, ugly and raw and desperate. It’s repulsive, an emotion that’s off-putting in its intensity, powerfully unwanted --

The words almost fall out of her, come out into the air before she can think to stop them: “I don’t wanna die at all.”

And it’s the first time in years -- years, in years and years and years -- that those words have been true. Mostly, she just hasn’t cared whether she lived or died, because if she died then it would be for a greater good or at least an end to it all… but right now, in this moment, she wants to _live_.

She wants to find that morning that Maz spoke of, when it won’t define her anymore, she wants to reach the point of being okay, she wants -- she wants to know if there’s really something here, between her and Cassian, or if it’s just the intensity of the circumstances. She wants to know how Bodhi knew her father. She wants to get to know Leia, the woman who looked at the destruction of her planet in the face and turned it into a weapon. She wants to introduce Luke to vodka and laugh at his first drunken antics. She wants to get into stupid situations that they can joke about later. She wants to run missions that save people and make her adrenaline rush, she wants to learn how to understand Chewie’s language, she wants to _be_.

She wants to live.

It’s terrifying, in its own way, since she’s so used to apathy -- caring is such a frightening act, such a small and huge and overwhelming thing to do, but she -- who spent the ages from eight to sixteen ready to die valiantly for the cause, and then the ages sixteen to twenty-three just ready to die -- wants to care. Wants to live. Wants to experience dumb things she’s always thought weren’t in her stars.

_All my possessions for a moment of time._

She would give up everything she has ever had, and will ever have, to just not die today.

She understands. _All my possessions_ \-- there is nothing in this world or any other, nothing in the galaxy, nothing in the entire universe, that is worth more than tomorrow.

The alarms are going off, and she’s helpless. Stuck in a bed, grounded, but at least she’s not alone.

“I don’t wanna die either,” Cassian says, and she looks at him, but he’s not looking at her. “I’ve been ready to die for a long time,” he admits. “But I don’t want to. Not now.”

The words come out of her, unbidden, except by the need to be known, for once. She didn’t feel like this on Scarif, when she was ready to die, but now -- ready to live -- she _has_ to connect to someone, and Cassian is here when he didn’t have to be, caring for her when he didn’t have to, helping her when he didn’t have to, he could have walked away and been fine, it’s --

“I was on Takodana,” she blurts out, and he looks at her, questioning but not speaking, so she goes on. “There’s a place there, a woman named Maz Kanata runs it. She knows everything, all kinds pass through her bar. There was a safehouse on the planet, and that’s where…” she pauses, swallows. “That’s where Saw left me, with a blaster and a knife, he promised he’d come back, but he didn’t. Maz had to tell me. She said…” Jyn closes her eyes, remembers everything about that awful moment, all the things she’s tried to forget. “She said they were pulling out of the system, and she didn’t know why, just that they were. I kept asking why, I…” she sighs.

“I broke a lot of her things, I said some… nasty things to her, but she fed me and gave me a place to stay anyway. She said…” she’s barely speaking above a whisper anymore, and she can’t look him in the face at the same time that she _needs_ someone else to know, to understand why this matters at all. “She told me that sometimes people do things and you never get a reason why, you never get closure, you just move on. And someday, some… one morning, I’d wake up and it wouldn’t define me anymore.”

There’s a moment of silence before he says, in a quiet voice, “And you want to see that morning.”

She nods, unable to speak, unable to look at him.

There’s another silence, and then he takes a deep breath.

“When the Empire attacked my home,” he says, and the words sound forced, almost like he’s shoving them out of his throat against every screaming instinct, “my mother woke me up and pushed me out the window, she told me to run, and not to stop. It’s… the only clear memory I have of her. I was so young… but she just wanted me to live, not to die with her, and… they bombed the whole city,” he explains, almost unnecessarily. “I ran into a rebel… well, separatist faction, they’d come to evacuate the planet but they were too late. I was the only survivor, at least of my city.”

“They were attacking that long ago?” she asks, and he nods.

“Fest was filled with separatists, and when the Emperor took power… there was a lot of propaganda, a lot of misinformation,” he explains. “But we were a target, and small enough that they could wipe us out and cover it up, so…”

“So they did,” she finishes for him. “You’ve been with the rebels ever since.”

He shrugs. “They raised me,” he says, “like Saw did you. I learned a long time ago not to care so much about my own life, so… to say, now,” he goes on, and finally looks up at her, “that I want to live, it’s… unfamiliar.”

“Surreal,” she agrees. “I was ready to die on Scarif,” she adds, unnecessarily. “I thought it would be the end, and… I was disappointed, but I would have been… fine. It would have been enough.”

The alarms stop suddenly, and they both look up.

“What does that mean?” she asks, although she thinks she already knows, and he looks at her, nods.

“That means it’s here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Cassian's thoughts on Han sound familiar, it's because he's essentially channeling Sophie Scholl, a German activist in the early 40's, whose full (if disputed) quote goes like this: _“The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”_
> 
> I feel like it's a quote that Cassian would very much appreciate.
> 
> Also, I have it currently at 10 chapters, but it may end up being 12, depending on how things play out as I actually sit down to write them.


	8. the indescribable moments of your life

we’ll find a way to offer up the night, tonight, _the indescribable moments of your life_ , tonight  
the impossible is possible tonight, believe in me as I believe in you, tonight, tonight

.

.

 _Death Star approaching_ , the voice over the comm says, and Jyn swallows hard.

She doesn’t know how to respond to any of this. The fact that someone is here with her at all, would choose to die with her, would choose her over any hope of maybe having some impact on the outcome -- that someone would want her to be the last person he was ever with, it…

She doesn’t know what to think.

The only thing she knows is that she does not want this moment to be her last, and she has no way to ensure that it isn’t.

“How long do you think we have?” she asks, in a low voice, and Cassian lets out a long breath.

“Maybe fifteen minutes,” he answers, voice carefully even. “It isn’t safe to come out of hyperspace any closer to the planet.”

Right, because of gravity, and interference from the other moons -- they were able to land within ten minutes of coming out of hyperspace, but the world has turned since then. Given them just that little bit much more time. Maybe it’ll be enough.

“Bodhi is out there?” she asks, even though she knows, and Cassian nods. “I thought he was an awful shot,” she says, trying to laugh, and he gives her a passing attempt at a smile.

“He’s a top-notch pilot,” he replies. “Most space dogfights are more about agility than aim. He’ll be fine. I trust him with my life.”

“Me too,” she says, without thinking about it, but then… it’s true. She _does_ trust Bodhi. He’s never been anything but kind to her, and he’s the person that her father chose out of all those in the Empire to carry his message, and he’s got a fantastically dark sense of humor and he’s always so terrified but never ever lets it stop him from doing what he knows to be right…

If she’s being honest with herself, she wishes that she could be like Bodhi. He thinks that he isn’t brave because he spends all his time being afraid, but she thinks it’s incredible that he never lets that fear stop him from doing the right thing.

After all, it isn’t Jyn and Cassian -- the lifelong rebels, the child soldiers, the ones that people like Bodhi thinks are heroes, because they don't know any better -- who is actually out there piloting a ship against the Empire.

Bodhi is the bravest person she’s ever met. She hopes, desperately, that she gets the chance to tell him that.

“Do you think they’ll do it?” she asks, in a low voice, before she can stop herself.

“I do,” he replies, although something in his tone tells her that he isn’t sure he believes it. “I trust Bodhi with my life. And Luke.”

She nods slowly.

“And if they don’t,” Cassian adds, with a falsely-dismissive laugh, “I won’t know about it.”

He’s not wrong.

“Fair enough,” she mutters, and glances at the chrono on the wall. If it came out of hyperspace when the alarms stopped, and the alarms stopped fifteen minutes before they reached the planet, that means… maybe twelve minutes, now. What do you do, she wonders, with what might -- or might not -- be the last twelve minutes of your life?

On Scarif, she had just wanted to feel the ground under her feet, and to not be alone. To feel an emotion other than exhaustion and emptiness.

Well, here, she is on the ground, feeling everything rather than nothing, and she isn’t alone, and it isn’t enough.

But at the same time, she’s paralyzed, in a way that she doesn’t remember ever being paralyzed before, by the fact that there is suddenly an upper limit on her future, and that limit isn't even a quarter-hour.

 _What will you wish you had done?_ some part of her whispers. _When you get to the afterlife, when you meet your mother and father and Chirrut and Baze, what will you wish you had done?_

 _Everything_ , she thinks. I’ll wish that I had been able to have a family. I’ll wish that I had been able to see the morning Maz promised me. I’ll wish that I had been able to see a galaxy without the Empire. I’ll wish that I had ever been able to watch some planet’s sun rise without thinking about what horror that sun is bringing with it. I’ll wish that I had ever woken up truly safe. I’ll wish that I had ever fallen in love.

I’ll wish that I had let him in, let him be the --

I’ll wish that I had reached out to him, after everything we’ve been through. I’ll wish -- I _do_ wish -- that I hadn’t lied about being injured. I’ll wish I had been standing behind Bodhi right now, giving him advice, egging him on, being _involved_. I’ll wish that I had been in the war room right now, with Leia, hearing what was going on even if I couldn’t contribute. I’ll wish that I had done more.

I’ll wish that I had had the faith in the people who I care about -- in Cassian, and in Bodhi, and in Luke, and even in Leia and Han -- to be with them when we all die.

I’ll wish for one more day.

 _The Death Star will be in firing range in six minutes_ , the tinny voice over the intercom says, probably a droid, and her heart seizes in her chest.

 _What will you wish you had done?_ There are always more things you regret not doing than you regret doing -- there are always more might-have-beens than wish-I-hadn’ts.

She looks up and meets Cassian’s eyes -- dark, so dark, almost black, she almost can’t see the color of them -- and decides.

Six minutes.

Jyn leans forward and kisses him.

.

With six minutes left until the world ends, Jyn kisses him, and his mind goes blank.

It’s because they’re about to die (maybe), but at the same time… he’d be lying if he said that he hadn’t been thinking about this for a while now. He’d be lying if he pretended that he hadn’t wondered, that he would have been okay with dying without this.

She pulls away too soon, before he can really regain control of his own thoughts, but she doesn’t go far, her forehead resting on his, her hand on the back of his neck, and he wants nothing more than to pull her closer to him, pull her into his arms, hold onto her and never let go and --

Why not?

The world will end in six minutes, five now, unless an untrained novice Jedi and an Imperial defector and a couple dozen other nobodies and cast-offs of the galaxy can destroy the Empire’s greatest weapon, their proven planet-killer, so what is there left to lose?

So he does, he pulls her into his arms and holds her tightly, and after a moment where she stiffens like she isn’t sure how to respond, she wraps her arms around him and buries her face into his shoulder, and this is… okay. This is an okay way to die, if he has to die.

He’d rather live, he’d rather uncover what comes next, he’d rather see a galaxy without the Empire, he’d rather get to know a future where he could perhaps have all (or at least some) of the things he’s always thought weren’t in a rebel spy’s destiny, but --

If he has to die, and it has to be today, this is how he’d like to go: with Jyn’s arms around him and her face buried in his shoulder and the static of her kiss on his mouth. This is okay. This would be… if not enough, then acceptable.

Nothing will be enough, a small part of him thinks, somewhat traitorously, nothing except everything, because it’s so unfair --

But Cassian has long since given up on a fair galaxy, and has long since settled on acceptable, okay, good enough. And this moment is far, far more than he ever thought he would be given, so it’s -- it would be enough by any standard except the one he’s come up on in the past couple of weeks, the star-high standard that Jyn Erso sets, it would be enough to him, if he had been measuring two weeks ago.

But now he wants more, and the idea that he might not have the chance to find more, to kiss her again, to -- that he might not have the chance to see a galaxy that is free, that he might not have the chance to avenge his people’s death --

This -- dying for his cause -- isn’t enough anymore, and it ought to be, always has been, but in this moment, it isn’t.

His thoughts are a mess, and he might only have two, three more minutes left to think of them at all, so he pulls her closer, and breathes her in -- bacta and soap, nothing personal, all medicinal and sterile, but it doesn’t matter because it means that if they survive, she will be _okay_ \--

He would give up everything he has and will ever have, for tomorrow.

Bodhi promised, he thinks to himself, even though he knows that promises don’t mean a damn thing in the face of the Empire. Bodhi promised, and Luke is a born Jedi. If they can’t do it, nobody can.

(Maybe nobody can. He refuses to consider it, that Galen’s treason might not have been enough.)

Cassian pulls Jyn closer, and refuses to look at the chrono on the wall, refuses -- for the first time in a long, long time --  to _know_.

.

“All wings report in,” someone from the base says, and they start --

“Red Ten, standing by.”

“Red Seven, standing by.”

“Red Three, standing by." 

“Red Six, standing by.”

“Red Nine, standing by.”

“Red Two, standing by.”

“Red Twelve,” he says, hands shaky on the controls the way they haven't been since he was a child. He clenches his fists to steady himself. “Standing by.”

“Red Eleven, standing by.”

“Red Five,” Luke says, sounding the opposite of the way Bodhi feels. “Standing by.”

They round the planet and it's just -- it's _there_ , all over again, huge and inexorable.

“Look at the _size_ of that thing!” someone exclaims.

This is so ridiculous. He should never have -- he’s a cargo pilot, his aim is absolutely horrendous, so bad that Luke told him -- with cheer and optimism, because the kid is some kind of supernatural avatar of sunshine, what the hell -- to just aim for the biggest guns, because you don’t have to have good aim to hit those. _We need people covering us_ , he’d said, and for some reason it had seemed logical at the time, because for some reason it always seems like things will work out the way Luke says they will.

He should be in the -- he catches himself.

 _It doesn’t matter where you should be_ , he thinks, and in his head, for whatever reason, he hears it in Galen’s voice. _It matters where you are now and what you do with it_.

It doesn’t matter that he shouldn’t be here, because the rebels barely scraped out of Scarif alive and they needed all the pilots they could get; he’d even told Dreis, _I can’t shoot for anything, but I’ve never, ever, ever crashed_. And it was true -- even his first attempts at the helm, he’d had a few near-misses, a few accidents, a few dumb mistakes and clipped wings and fried hyperdrives, but every ship he’s ever flown, he’s brought safely to ground. Even _Rogue One_.

 _Then you’re on my team_ , Dreis had said. _We have two open X-Wings_.

“Gold team, Red team,” a new voice says, “this is Green Leader. We’re going to draw fire on their eastern side.”

“Copy,” Dreis says. “Red team, we’re going to draw fire on the west. Gold team?”

“Starting our attack run,” Gold Leader says.

“Copy,” Dreis and Green Leader say at the same time, and the squadrons split off from each other.

“Red Two, Red Five, Red Twelve,” Dreis says, and Bodhi jolts in his seat, even though he already feels electrified. “I want you going in lowest, fire at the base of their guns and try to disable as many as you can.”

“Copy that,” he replies.

“Stay in tight formation,” he adds. “Stay too low for them to hit you, but don’t crash.”

“Our specialty,” Luke mutters, and the three of them branch off.

“Let me lead,” Bodhi says shortly, and then gives a little, mildly-hysterical laugh. “I don’t wanna accidentally shoot either of you.”

“Not a problem there,” Red Two -- Antilles, he thinks, Wedge Antilles. The name is vaguely familiar.  He sounds amused.

“Don’t worry,” Luke says. “We’ve got your back.”

That… is actually kind of comforting, honestly. It seems like he’s the only one who feels completely overwhelmed by this, if he lets himself think about it at all.

And then there’s no time to think, because they’re _there_ , skimming the surface. It’s not as smooth up close as it seems from far away, there’s a million little nooks and crannies and a hundred guns all swiveling around, targeting.

Luke takes out the first tower, and Bodhi takes out the second, and then someone -- he has no idea who, but undoubtedly a Red wing -- comes in too close and isn’t as skilled at maneuvering, isn’t as good at close-range flight with uneven terrain, and the wing hits a turret first, before the whole ship comes crashing down to the surface, maybe fifty meters from Luke.

“Luke!” Wedge cries, and then Red Five appears through the smoke, on periphery.

“I’m okay!” Luke replies. “I got a little cooked, but I’m fine.”

“There’s another gun on our starboard,” Bodhi says, feeling a little out of his own body, a little bit like someone else has taken control of him, a little distant. “And one straight ahead. They’re smaller, firing faster. I’m going after the one to starboard.”

“I’ve got the one straight ahead,” Wedge reports.

His hands have stopped shaking. It’s not that he’s not afraid; it’s just that -- Red squadron’s first casualty came because someone wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t in the moment, made the kind of mistake that Bodhi learned not to make over a decade ago.

Bodhi has _never_ crashed. He has _always_ brought his ship to ground safely, no injuries, no permanent damage. He is not going to start screwing up today.

It’s the same way he felt on Scarif, with the cable, the sense of _it has to be done_ carving away all the fear and cauterizing the wound behind it. Those guns _have_ to be taken out. They _have_ to draw fire from Gold squadron.

“There’s a lot of fire coming in from the right side of that deflection tower,” someone else on the comm says.

“We’re on it,” Luke says.

Bodhi curses under his breath as he fires on the turret and hits it -- it’s a huge target, impossible to miss -- but it isn’t enough to disable the thing. But then Luke, following right behind him, hits it again and it comes down, crumbling in on itself. But there's no time to celebrate:

“Squad leaders,” someone from the base says, “we’ve picked up a new group of signals. You’ve got enemy fighters coming your way.”

“My scope’s negative,” Luke replies. “I don’t see anything.”

“Pick up your visual scanning!” someone else says, and then another voice -- maybe Biggs, maybe Dreis, who even knows at this point -- says, urgently --

“ _Here they come!_ ”

And then there’s a squadron of TIE fighters on them, but they act… strange. They don’t fire. Instead, they crowd.

“What the hell are they doing?” someone, probably Wedge, cries.

“Red team, this is Gold Five,” another voice cuts in. “We’ve tried three attack runs, we can’t hit it, it’s too narrow. We need backup _now!_ ”

“On it,” someone says, and a couple of fighters peel off toward the center of the space station. He looks around -- the TIE fighters aren’t holding back against the other squadrons. It’s just them.

An awful creeping sensation slides up, and then down, Bodhi’s back.

Where are they trying to herd Red squadron, and why?

The thought rises, unbidden -- _Skywalker? The child lived?_ \-- but it’s ridic… is it really that ridiculous? That Darth Vader might be trying to take them alive, to take _Luke_ alive? But if he isn’t certain which ship Luke is piloting, with everyone in such close formation, he might just have ordered the TIE fighters to crowd and herd Red squadron into the tractor beam, rather than shoot any of them down and risk hitting the one he really wants to capture.

But why the hell would Darth Vader really care to take Luke alive?

He doesn’t have time to worry about it now. Gold squadron is getting shredded, but as soon as the two Red wings split off, they’re mobbed by TIE fighters, forced into evasive maneuvering. Both of them -- one of them might have been Dreis, he thinks it _was_ Red Leader -- get shot down before they can reach the trench.

“Luke,” he says, in that same peculiar out-of-body feeling, “you, me, and Wedge, let’s go.”

“What the hell are they doing?” Wedge repeats, flying a bit erratically, trying to shake the ships on their tail, but they still don’t -- they aren’t _firing_. They ought to be firing. They’re all practically sitting ducks out here, why aren’t they firing? “They’re not _attacking_ us, they’re just trying to -- “

“Take us alive,” Luke finishes for him, in a tone of dawning realization. “They want us alive.”

 _They want_ you _alive_ , Bodhi thinks, but doesn’t say.

“Why do they want us alive?” someone else in Red team asks. “What are they doing?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bodhi yells. “It doesn’t matter what they want, it matters what we _do!_ ”

“He’s right,” Luke says sharply. “Gold team just got torn to pieces, but if they’re trying to take us alive, it gives us an advantage. Red team,” he says, to the open comm, all rebel frequencies, “we’re starting our attack run.”

As one, the remaining Red wings -- it seems like so few, and they already had few enough to start with -- veer east toward the medial trench.

“They’re trying to push us into the tractor beam,” Luke goes on, and it seems like he’s taking the lead -- maybe he’s guessed why the Empire is acting so strange, or maybe he’s just that kind of person, the one who sees a blank space and fills it with himself. “Stay on me.”

 _Yeah_ , Bodhi thinks, _he has a hunch, at least._

 _Stay on me_ \-- because they didn’t fire on any Red wings until they split away from Luke, and if it’s Luke they want alive and are afraid to hit, that means that the closer they stay to Luke, the safer they are.

And then they’re at the trench, and a decision has to be made.

“I’m going in,” Wedge says, making it without having to be asked. “Cover me.”

“We’ve got you,” he replies, and is echoed by Luke and a handful of others, what’s left of Red team.

“Green team,” Luke shouts over the comm, “it seems like they’re trying to take us alive, they’re not firing on us. Abandon the east side, join us. If they’re afraid of taking some of us down, it might ease fire on you.”

“Copy that,” a woman’s voice, different from the one before, says, and then the ragged edges of Green squadron are joining them, and -- he was right, Luke was right -- they’re afraid to take down any of the group, for fear of shrapnel accidentally bringing down Luke, or at least a Red wing.

( _No one would go this far to take an old enemy’s son alive_ , a tiny voice whispers in the back of his head. _What is Darth Vader really doing here?_ )

And at this point it becomes a game of agility, and Bodhi isn’t sure they’ll be _able_ to turn around for another run if Wedge fails.

“That tractor beam is close to us,” Bodhi yells, manic energy making him louder and more desperate than he feels. “Be prepared to pull away as soon as Red Two fires.”

“Copy that,” multiple voices reply.

“Why do they want us alive?” someone else says -- Red Three, he recognizes, Biggs Darklighter. “What are they _doing?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Luke replies, in a tone filled with trepidation. “But they _are_ , and we can’t be taken alive. We have to take this thing down _now_.”

“They’ve never tried to take Rebel fighters alive before,” Biggs goes on. “What’s going on?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bodhi repeats, but Biggs keeps on.

“Like hell it doesn’t!”

“It doesn’t,” another voice cuts in -- female, cultured, sharp and familiar. Leia. “We can discuss the reasons that the Empire may have wanted you alive later. You have four minutes until they are in firing range of the base.”

Four minutes. All lines go dark for a moment, as everyone complies, as they fly, covering Wedge and swapping formation around almost without having to be told -- like they’ve all been given unspoken orders: _whoever or whatever it is that they’re after, make sure they never figure out where it is_.

“I’m firing!” Wedge cries, and he holds his breath, but then -- a sigh, “ _Missed_ ,” and several curses come over the line; Red Two pulls up and around, and the next few seconds are chaos as two whole(ish) squadrons try to make a U-turn while a dozen TIE fighters try to herd them toward the tractor beam.

A lot of rebel wings fail. A lot of ships hit the surface and go up in vacuum-stifled flames. A lot of curses cut short on the comm, the kind of last words that nobody wants on the record.

A lot of them don’t make it.

When the smoke clears, they’ve been culled again -- it’s just the best _pilots_ left now, he thinks, not the best fighters, but the most _agile_ , the ones who were able to maintain control throughout the mess of the turnaround. A handful from Green, a handful from Red, one, maybe two from Gold.

The Rebel fleet has already been more than halved again.

“Who is left?” someone from Green cries, a woman. “This is Green Four. Sign in!”

“Green Three!”

“Red Twelve!” he cries.

“Green Eleven!”

“Green Seven!”

“Red Five!”

“Red Two!”

“Red Three!”

“Green Ten!”

“Red Four!”

“Gold Three!”

“Red Nine!”

“Green Twelve!”

“Gold Seven!”

And… that’s it. All three squadron leaders are out. It’s now or never. They won’t survive another failed run.

“I’m going in,” Luke says, and it feels like destiny; it feels like it’s been coming to this.

“We’ve got your back,” Bodhi replies, and the tattered remnants of the fleet organize -- he joins Biggs and Wedge in the trench, to stay on Luke’s back, as the rest of the fleet flies above and keeps their opponents occupied. And for a moment, it seems to be almost going all right.

“They’re coming from behind!” someone else cries -- Red Four, maybe, or one of the Gold squadron -- before going up in flames.

“Green Team, _to me!_ ” Green Four shouts. “Keep them out of the trench! Red Team, keep them off the front!”

“Copy!” several voices cry out, and Bodhi shoots down another turret, and he knows, with cold and awful certainty:

This is the last stand.

It’s Luke, or nothing. If Luke can’t do this, it’s over, it’s all over.

Four minutes when Leia had spoken to them, now more like one, if that.

And then three TIE fighters break from the fleet and make it into the trench, with some incredible maneuvering, beyond-expert flying. He and Wedge manage to dodge, but Biggs is taken down, crashing hard into the wall, his last word a cut-off “Lu -- “ like he was trying to say something important but never got the chance to, and…

 _It’s over,_ Bodhi thinks, dodging laser fire, a bit distantly. _It’s really about to be over._

They want Luke alive, and he’s down here in the trench, and they can just shoot him and Wedge down and then crowd Luke into the tractor beam and demolish the rest of the fleet, and --

“I’m hit!” Wedge cries. “I can’t stay with you!”

“Get clear, Wedge,” Luke replies. “You can’t do any more good back there!”

“I’m sorry!” Wedge says, and pulls out. In a distant way, Bodhi is glad that he might survive.

“I’m still here!” he shouts, dodging hard and wincing as shrapnel hits his ship, but not enough to bring him down. He has never crashed. Even with all the despair trying to steal the breath from his lungs, he still clings to that: he has never crashed. They’ll have to shoot him down, shoot him to pieces, they _won’t_ make him crash. “I’m still on you!”

“Watch yourself!” Luke yells. “Don’t get yourself killed staying on my back!”

“I’m with you,” he says, with a strange sort of clarity, “until the end.”

Clarity, because he knows -- it’s over.

“Keep that central one occupied!” Luke cries.

“I’ve got it!” he lies, because he doesn’t want to die, and he doesn’t want Luke to die, but since they’re going to -- when they die here, he wants Luke to die believing that nobody ever gave up on him. That _Bodhi_ did not give up on him.

The Rebellion is finished, here and now, because -- because he wasn’t good enough, or fast enough. Because Leia believed in them, and she shouldn’t have. Because Galen’s revenge was too narrow a target. Because the Battle of Scarif left them too thin. Because the Empire is too big, too strong, and they are too small, not enough. Never enough.

They have failed. Somehow, he didn’t really believe that they could. Somehow, deep down in his heart, he really _did_ believe that the Force would carry them through. He really did believe that the Force would be with them.

He told Cassian he would see him again, Jyn that he would see her again, and they had believed him. Believed _in_ him.

The one time in his entire life that he has ever been confident, ever truly believed in something, and…

They weren’t enough. They were stretched too thin, cut too low, with too small a target.

It was always impossible, he realizes, in the few seconds of cold retrospect that he is going to get, as he narrowly dodges another blast. They seem to know which one of them is Luke, now, and they’re gunning for Bodhi, to take him down. This is it.

Everything, all of it, all that he’s done, it was always going to come to nothing. Why did he ever think that one person could change the course of history, could upset the Empire, could make a difference in a galaxy of trillions? It was never possible.

It was always futile.

But then something happens in periphery -- another blaster fires, out of nowhere, above and to the east where none of their ships are, and takes out one of the ones following them, and the other in quick order, while the central one careens off into the distance.

“ _Yah-hoo!_ ” Han Solo’s voice crows over the comm. “You’re all clear, kid! Now let’s blow this thing and go home!”

Bodhi breathes again, and his vision blurs.

Luke fires, and they both pull out of the trench.

“Direct hit!” Luke shouts over the comm, and the remainder of the Rebel fleet -- and the _Millennium Falcon_ \-- fly away at top speed. There’s maybe ten of them, maybe less, remaining of the forty-five who started this run.

They fly hard for the base, but he keeps his eye on his rear scope, and --

It takes a minute or so, maybe ninety seconds, and then it’s exploding like a supernova, bright light and force pushing them forward, and --

And it’s over. It _is_ over.

And they have won.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (green four is shara bey's call sign, jsyk.)


	9. but a little won't fly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know. I know! _I know._ I'm so sorry for the delay, this chapter fought me in ways I cannot describe. I am also unsure if there is one or two chapters left, but definitely no more than two. We're almost to the end! To everyone who has been reading or just started or forgot about it and came back, or however you ended up at this a/n -- thank you so much! I love all of you, more than I can say.

you used to do a little _but a little won't fly_ , right before you hit your prime  
that’s where we fell in love, but not the first time

.

.

Somehow, the world doesn’t end.

The time catches her attention before the running feet do; seven minutes have passed. Seven minutes, out of six.

And the world hasn’t ended.

She pulls away from Cassian, he turns, and they see people in the halls, running toward the hangar; she catches sight of Mon Mothma running with no concern to dignity, a few older men she doesn’t know, a bunch of whooping soldiers, and Leia, who pauses at the door with a luminous grin on her face.

“They’re coming back,” she tells them, eyes bright with tears she’ll never shed and alight with a vicious sort of hope, of vengeance taken, blood repaid. “It’s done.”

_It’s_ _done_.

She stumbles to her feet, half-aided by Cassian and half-falling onto his shoulder, and they stagger out of the medbay into the rushing crowd, everyone running to the hangar to meet the heroes.

“How many survivors?” Cassian shouts over the din, and Leia glances back at him.

“Nine pilots,” she replies, with a bit of remorse. “And also Han.”

Han -- Han, who left them to pursue his own demons, Han --

“Bodhi? Luke?” Jyn asks, and either the answer is bad or Leia simply doesn’t hear them -- it could easily be either, in the chaos, and with only nine survivors of the fleet.

Nine survivors. The nine best pilots, probably, or the luckiest. Nine, out of how many dozens, hundreds a week ago?

It’s done -- the Death Star is done, it’s over, but the Empire survives and they are bled dry.

(She’s thinking of the Rebellion as an us rather than a them. She wonders distantly if there was ever a galaxy, ever a universe, in which she left them behind after Jedha.)

They’re two of the last into the hangar, still moving slowly, still healing, and the nine wings -- plus the _Falcon_ \-- are already there. She catches sight of Luke jumping out of an X-Wing, laughing with joy, as Han joins him, claps him on the back with a grin, yelling something; Leia joins them and throws her arms around Luke, before half the base reaches him, cheering.

(It’s not hard to figure out who fired the killing blow. It was always going to be Luke; Jedi are like that, black holes of destiny, everything warping into their gravity and orbiting around them. Of course it was Luke who brought down the Empire’s greatest weapon; just like of course it was Ben who brought them to Leia, and of course it is Ben’s former protege Vader who sits at the Emperor’s right hand -- for better or worse, it’s always the Jedi, the Force’s Chosen Ones.)

She’s glad to see that Luke is alive, but he’s not the one she’s really looking for. Her fingers are clutching Cassian’s arm with force enough to bruise if not break skin; somehow, there was never a scenario in her head where they survived today but Bodhi didn’t.

He carried the message, he carried them off Scarif, he limped back here with them, he can’t just…

Cassian spots him before Jyn does; she hears him cry out, “Bodhi!” and turns to see him stumbling out of an X-Wing, looking shaken and sweaty and scared, but alive.

_Alive_.

The relief washes over her like a wave, weakens her at the knees, and in some small part of her, she wonders when she became this sentimental, to get emotional over the survival of a single person in the midst of this galaxy-spanning revolution.

Saw would have scoffed at her, but then…

Saw is not here.

Bodhi is here. Luke, and Leia, and Han -- they are here. Cassian is here.

She lets a smile light her face as Bodhi meets them halfway, and throws her arms around him tightly.

.

Tomorrow, Bodhi knows, there will be a ceremony, with medals. Tomorrow, there will be a funeral, and then an evacuation.

Tonight, there is a party.

He’s a hero -- Luke tells everyone, he tells them that it’s as much down to Bodhi and Han as it was to him, that he couldn’t have done it without them, and… well, he’s right about Han. All nine of the surviving pilots plus Han are treated like royalty, and all of them look equally uncomfortable with it.

“It’s not that I mind,” Green Four -- Shara, her name is Shara, she’s a Lieutenant, she has a young son -- tells him in a low voice. “It’s just that… I don’t really feel like celebrating when half my friends are dead. I mean,” she adds, a bit hastily, “they knew what they were getting into, and they died as heroes, but…”

He nods. “I just want to grieve,” he admits. “My whole family died less than two weeks ago,” he goes on, and she looks at him with sympathy as the burning starts behind his eyes. “I don’t want to celebrate.”

“You should talk to Leia,” Shara says, and he shrugs with deliberate carelessness. Leia is celebrating with Luke and Han like she hasn’t lost anything, and he wonders how she does it -- is it that she’s supernaturally good at hiding her pain, or is she truly that heartless? “She’s planning something, I’m not sure what. But she wants to talk to you.”

_Can it bring several billion people back from the dead?_ he wants to ask harshly, but he swallows it down hard. Shara strikes him as the sort of person who deals with things through action, she’s like Jyn, like a lot of the rebels: she can handle anything as long as she feels like there’s something she can do about it. So what’s she’s trying to do is make him feel better by telling him that there is something he can do about it. 

Except there’s nothing.

But even though Shara is in no mood to celebrate either, he doesn’t feel like it’s his place to unload all of his emotions onto her. He forces a smile that he knows doesn’t even look remotely sincere.

“I’m gonna -- “ he starts, indicating to the door, and Shara nods, understanding.

“I’ll tell them you were tired,” she says. “You’ve had a long couple of weeks.”

He ducks out of the party but doesn’t have anywhere else, really, to go. They assigned him a room, but they’re all bugging out starting tomorrow, so there’s no point in unpacking, and he wants to be alone at the same time that he _really really_ _does not_ want to be alone.

So he goes a few halls down, where it’s quiet, and leans against the wall and sinks slowly to the floor, letting his head fall onto his knees.

He doesn’t cry. He just sits.

It’s all happened so fast, it’s impossible to wrap his head around any of it. Jyn would claim to understand, and probably so would Cassian, but they wouldn’t really. They’d understand a lot of it, all the outlines and broad strokes, but they wouldn’t understand the details.

So it’s just him, sitting here like an unwanted child on the playground, stewing in his own indefinable pain. There’s no way to conceptualize it, understand it, express it.

He’s lost everything, everyone, and his home planet isn’t even inhabitable anymore; there’s no more home to go back to, and nobody who cares about him to greet him even if he could. It’s just… gone, all of it, gone. He doesn’t even know where to start grieving, let alone where to start healing.

He’s been there like that for maybe twenty minutes, maybe more, when he hears footsteps.

“There you are,” Leia says, and he looks up at her. She’s alone, and in the open halls of the ziggurat, she looks terribly small. “Lieutenant Bey told me that you’d left the party, but I had hoped to speak with you before you retired.”

He swallows hard. “What about?”

She seems to hesitate, to weigh options. “Several things,” she says finally, a bit haltingly. “You were from Jedha, if I recall correctly?”

“I was.”

She pauses again, swallows. “Did anyone you know survive?” she asks in a small voice, and when he shakes his head she lets out a long, slow breath. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, voice barely above a whisper.

“Did anyone _you_ know survive?” he asks, and she shakes her head, and for the first time he sees that her eyes are wet. So it’s that she’s supernaturally good at hiding it. That _is_ some comfort. He bites his tongue, but can’t stop the words from coming out of him. “I was about to be an uncle,” he says, and his voice breaks. “Her name was Alia, she, um… she was supposed to be born a few days ago.”

Leia finally joins him, sitting on the floor in a distinctly un-regal way, close enough for their knees to brush, but doesn’t speak. He swallows and glances away, vision blurring.

“My parents were excited, she was their first grandchild. Eliana was excited, scared, it was a surprise, but… excited. I told them I’d help them,” he says, voice lowering with every syllable. “Any way I could, I’d buy food for them and babysit and…” he trails off, looking away. He’s quiet for a moment, before he takes a deep breath. “Then Galen told me about the Death Star, and he told me they wouldn’t be safe as long as it…”

He wasn’t wrong, but Bodhi doesn’t really know how to express that. He doesn’t blame Galen -- they didn’t attack Jedha because he defected, they attacked Jedha because of Saw and the Partisans. Galen wasn’t trying to hurt him, he never meant him any harm; in fact, he’d been trying to give him the opportunity to protect the people he loved.

The people at fault are dead now, but it’s no condolence.

Them being dead didn’t bring his family back; being involved in getting revenge didn’t allow him to meet Alia.

He’s been quiet too long, and he can’t tell if Leia is waiting for him to say more or not, but he really can’t speak right now.

“I was adopted,” she says suddenly, and he looks up at her. She isn’t looking at him. “When I was young, I thought of it… I thought that my birth parents hadn’t wanted me, and that was what mattered. But I was wrong,” she goes on thickly, swallowing. “What mattered was that the people who raised me _did_. My mother and father were Bail and Breha Organa, not whoever gave birth to me. Alderaan was my home, not wherever I was born. And…” she trails off, takes a deep breath and looks up to the ceiling to stop tears from falling. “No one can _possibly_ understand what I feel right now, except you.”

_Where do you go, when everyone you fought for is dead?_

Leia takes a deep breath, and he recalls Shara telling him that she was planning something.

Maybe Leia has an answer.

“All the people I wanted to protect are dead, and we’ve killed the thing that killed them,” he murmurs, drained of emotion. “So what do we do now?”

She sniffs, takes two sharp, quick breaths, and looks back at him. Not a single tear has fallen on her face. He thinks that she is simply that sort of person, the one who will never, ever show weakness in front of people, regardless of the circumstances. The one who builds her own strength out of her own blood and her own soul, piece by agonizing piece, and will never give up even a millimeter of ground, even when she probably should.

“That is the other thing I wanted to discuss with you,” she says, and her voice is tight, stretched-thin. “I was planning to gather a group of people together and find refugees from Alderaan and Jedha,” she explains, voice strengthening with every word as she moves toward firmer and firmer ground. “People who have nowhere to go back to, who weren’t on the planets when the Empire attacked. I want to find them and give them the opportunity to join the Rebellion. They’re still my people,” she adds quietly. “Our planet may be gone, but _I_ am not and _I_ will not abandon them. And I want you to join me.”

He hesitates.

He thinks of Shara, and of Jyn, the sort of people who are born to fight injustice and have defiance etched into their bones. He thinks of Galen telling him that he could do right by himself, and of Cassian telling Jyn -- all the way back on Eadu, two weeks and a lifetime ago -- that she wasn’t the only one who’d lost everything, but some of them decided to do something about it. He thinks of his family, now atoms drifting around a dead planet, and of Leia’s family, now atoms drifting in the vacuum of space. He thinks of Luke, who relied on him to have his back when they were at the Death Star, and of Han, who swore that he couldn’t fight this war but came back for them anyway.

He decides.

“I’m in,” he says, with clarity and force. Leia smiles, and reaches out a hand; he takes it and she holds it with both of her own.

“We can’t undo it,” she says softly. “We can’t bring them back. But we _can_ do this. I am _honored_ ,” she adds with complete sincerity, “to have you join me.”

She has never been his ruler and Jedha never had a king or queen, but in this moment, he sees why nobody ever questions her title.

.

The medics (and Cassian, come to think of it) will literally kill her if she drinks alcohol tonight, and at any rate her head is swirling with a thousand different emotions (what do you do, she wonders, with a future you didn't expect to have?), so Jyn decides not to waste time with the celebration.

Cassian offers to stay with her, but she feigns exhaustion and insists that he join the rest of the rebels, which he seems to take at face value, but of course, with him…

She's uncomfortable, but in an unfamiliar way -- not with him, but with herself. She's not used to anything coming easily or naturally, and she can't help but wonder when the other shoe will fall, when this will all go wrong, too.

“Ah,” a voice at the door says, and she looks up from the datapad she's been staring blankly at, to see Leia. She looks tired, Jyn thinks, the sort that's too tired to rest. “I was hoping I'd find you here.”

“Well,” she starts, with a half-hearted smile, “I'm not really in… partying condition.”

Leia’s smile looks as genuine as her own feels, so she plows ahead.

“I’m told we’re evacuating tomorrow, but the medics are saying I should be… fine,” she says, a bit lamely. The actual conversation had been the head medic insisting that she remain on bed rest under observation for another day to ensure that the sepsis she had, in fact, developed, had not caused any severe organ damage -- and Jyn adamantly refusing to stay in bed for another day, so resolutely and so loudly that the he had finally given up out of sheer frustration.

“That isn't the way I heard it,” Leia says quietly, but seems more amused than admonishing.

“Well…” she starts, but can't finish -- if Princess Leia, unofficial head of the Rebel Alliance, short of maybe Mon Mothma, demands that she rest, she’ll be in a tight spot. But:

“That… isn't why I'm here,” Leia says, with some awkwardness, and takes the seat beside her. “Senator Mothma explained to me that you were promised your freedom, in exchange for helping us find your father. If you still… want that, then, of course, we’ll be happy to oblige -- “ she says this rapidly, as though hoping to barrel past the option before Jyn can choose it “ -- but I… I and the Alliance could very much use your help.”

“You're offering me a rank, is that it?” she asks, but Leia takes a deep breath.

“Yes,” she replies slowly, but with an odd sort of hesitation, like the answer isn't that simple, “the Alliance is offering you the rank of Sergeant and all that that entails, and I… am offering you a mission. You don't have to accept both. This mission is purely voluntary.”

She pauses, but already knows -- if there was ever a galaxy where she left the Rebellion after Jedha, there certainly was never one where she left after the Death Star.

But it isn't in her to give ground easily.

“What would this mission be?” she asks, and Leia quickly counters:

“Are you accepting?”

She hesitates, even still. “The rank,” she admits, with half a shrug. “But I'd like to know what mission you want me to go on, first.”

Leia smiles as though laughing at some private joke. “They did warn me that you weren't one for blindly following orders.”

“Never have been,” she replies, and it's a bit of a lie (she followed every order Saw ever gave her). “Never will be.”

Leia nods slowly, vaguely approving, folding her hands in her lap and appearing to relax some. “There are survivors, from Alderaan and Jedha, people who were off-planet for one reason or another, and now have nowhere to return to.”

“And you want to find them and bring them here?”

“Well, yes,” she explains, and Jyn can't quite identify it -- maybe it's the more relaxed way she sits, maybe it's something in her voice -- but it seems like Leia is suddenly more human, more of the person who quietly comforted Luke than the one who ordered a general around with practiced ease. It, sort of against her will, sets Jyn at ease, too. “Offer them a place here, and establish a refuge for those who don't want to fight.”

The way she says it, there's this inflection on the last bit, that sounds like she doesn't believe anyone will be in that second group -- after all, in the face of such loss, who could choose _not_ to fight the instigator?

Jyn, who has been on both sides of this wall, can think of a few reasons, and even a couple why someone might sell them out to the Empire.

People react to trauma in all kinds of ways, and not all (or even most) of them constructive.

But there's no sense in pointing this out. After all, she just said she plans to set up a refuge, didn't she?

“Who else is coming?” she asks.

“Lieutenant Rook has already agreed,” Leia replies. “I’m also going to talk with Captain Andor and Luke.”

“Won't the Alliance need Cassian?” she asks haltingly. “This sounds like a… long mission.”

“It’ll be his decision, not General Draven’s, if he wants to leave Intelligence.”

“I don't know if he… will,” she replies, with what she feels is a measured and even tone. Leia purses her lips.

“Intelligence isn’t a division you stay in for life,” Leia says, almost thoughtfully. “Or, rather, a _long_ life. He may be interested in seeking out a new niche. He’d hardly be the first, or even the fiftieth.”

_He may be interested in seeking out a new niche_. There could be a number of reasons for Leia to believe that, and it may even be true -- Cassian doesn't exactly strike her as the sort of person who enjoys being a spy. In fact, everything she's seen of him suggests that he hates his job -- but less than he hates the Empire, so he does it without complaint.

But he's good at it, is the thing. He's extremely useful to the Rebellion, as a spy, and would be significantly less useful -- and doing less to strike down the Empire -- on Leia’s semi-personal mission to reunite what's left of her people under the banner of Rebellion.

Jyn honestly can't predict what his response to this offer will be. Leia, on the other hand, seems confident.

(She wonders, a bit traitorously, a bit quietly, in the private places in the very back of her mind, if he would choose to leave Intelligence for this mission because Jyn was going along with it. She wonders, but even there, in the place where she keeps the debris of all her hopes, she doesnt know.)

“Would we use the _Falcon_?” she asks, and Leia’s expression goes slightly pained, then wooden.

“If… Captain Solo,” she replies through gritted teeth, “were willing and able to lend it to us, yes, I would prefer that. We wouldn't be depriving the fleet of any ships, in that case.”

_Lend it to us_. Who the hell does she think she's kidding? He might agree to fly them, but he'll never let them take it without him. Jyn wouldn’t mind that -- Han has been nicer to her than he had to be, he let her sleep in his bunk when she was injured, and his quick thinking was instrumental in getting them out of trouble at the Death Star, she has no problem with him at all -- but she really feels like Leia will.

“I…” she starts, wincing, “I think he and the ship are a package deal.”

Leia’s expression appears carved into her face. “That will be a conversation we can have in the planning phase,” she says delicately. “Does this mean you're agreeing to join?”

Yes.

No.

Is she willing to commit to a mission of indeterminate length -- which could possibly take her into places like prisons and refugee camps on distant worlds -- with people she hardly knows? Surely they won't be away from the new base at all times, but it seems… untoward, for her to join the Rebellion and then immediately take on a mission with an isolated group of people, doing work that is only tangentially related to the Rebellion itself.

On the other hand, it would be a good way to ease herself back into the structure of formal Rebellion. Maybe that was why Leia relaxed, why she smiled, her private joke -- Jyn doesn't follow orders blindly, so she needs a training-wheels mission that won't force her to follow too many orders from too many people, yet. Maybe that's why she offered in the first place.

...maybe she's right.

Jyn _does_ chafe under authority, she _would_ find it jarring and grating to be thrust into an army straight out of her past seven years of freefall. She _does_ need to ease into this, if she wants to do it right for once.

And Leia has, perhaps in a show of grace, not pointed it out.

What it comes down to is this: Jyn knows Leia, a bit. She knows Bodhi, and Luke, and -- although the princess may hem and haw about him coming along, he almost-certainly will -- Han. She knows Cassian, if he decides to join. She doesn't know anyone else here, and the other leaders she does know, she's reluctant to trust or follow. But Leia strikes her as someone to believe in. Leia is a leader she believes that she can work with without biting her tongue.

And so she'll go, ultimately because of all the people that Leia knows here, all the people she's grown up with and spent her whole life working with, she chose to offer this to _Jyn_.

People don't choose Jyn. There's always something or someone more important, someone more indispensable, something they value more than her presence. People work with her to accomplish something else, but they never seek her out when another person could do. No one decides that, out of all the souls in the galaxy, Jyn Erso is who they _want_ to know.

( _Well_ , that tiny part of her whispers, _there is one, a first before Leia, now_.)

(He chose to face his possible death with her rather than stand with the people who probably raised him, taught him all he knew. She can't put into clear words what that means to her, but it's not nothing.)

But Leia is offering this, to her specifically, and she sought out Jyn almost before she sought out anyone else, and… that means something to her, although she'll probably die before she'll admit it.

“Yeah,” she says finally, with a surprisingly-easy smile. “I'm in.”

.

Somehow, he ends up sitting next to Han Solo, which is… _something_. Bodhi hadn’t pointed out the fact that he called this, foresaw Han’s miraculous eleventh-hour return, but it was still there in the air anyway, lingering.

Cassian has given up on dozens of potential rebels just like Han.

It seems like he’s had a lot of things called into question since Jyn Erso swept into his life like a typhoon.

(By some unspoken agreement, neither of them have brought up the fact that she kissed him; he wants to, but she’ll spook easily, so he waits for her cue. He knows too well how she thinks: her life is fair game, but her heart she guards like the most precious gem. If he could even claim any place there, or if she simply wanted to feel close to someone at the end of the world.)

But now she’s sleeping in the medbay, and Bodhi has disappeared, and the night is really digging into the drinking, and the cheers have picked up, and he’d like little more than to be sitting alone in that uncomfortable chair beside her, or at least in his own goddamn bed, but here he is, because… somehow he isn’t quite ready for this chapter to be over.

Yavin IV has been the closest thing to home he can remember. Leaving it -- leaving the place where those rebels first brought him when he was a child, the place where he had his first drink, first (bad) kiss, first everything he can still remember -- is bittersweet. They designed the place to be able to evacuate quickly; by this time tomorrow he’ll be en route to the new base, and Yavin IV will be behind him forever.

He is never going to come back to this planet.

But at least he isn’t going forward alone.

“Yeah, everyone’s packing up to leave tomorrow,” Han is saying, making a face. “But I've still gotta go back to Tatooine.”

“How far did you get before turning around?” Luke asks from Han’s other side, and he sighs.

“Almost too far,” he admits as he takes a drink to hide what Cassian is reasonably sure is fear; Han almost didn’t make it in time, and he knows it. “Jabba won’t be happy that his payment is delayed, but… eh, screw him.”

Luke smiles at that, but Cassian knows better; Han took a huge risk, keeping Jabba waiting, and although it was definitely the right thing to do, he suspects that until the very moment that Han turned the ship around, he was telling himself that they would be fine and Jabba _could not_ be kept waiting any longer.

“So, you’ll meet us at the new base, then?” Luke prompts, and Han cringes.

“If Leia will give me the coordinates. I don’t think she trusts me.”

“I don’t think she trusts many people,” Luke replies. “I’m sure she’ll hand them off to you.”

It’s a little strange, he thinks, kind of distantly, that Luke just assumed that Han’s return meant that he was committing to the rebellion, and even stranger than Han agreed to it without question.

( _Cassian has given up on dozens --_ )

“Dress warm,” he mutters, and drains the last of his drink. They told him, at the debriefing, that the new main base was to be built on Hoth, a gods-forsaken icy wasteland of a planet that no one in their right mind would ever choose to inhabit. It makes it the perfect hiding place, of course, but it is going to be absolutely miserable all the same.

“It’s a cold planet?” Han asks, and Cassian raises an eyebrow. Luke shrugs.

“Sounds good to me,” he says, and both of them look at him. “I grew up on Tatooine. I’m ready for a change of pace.”

Cassian hesitates, then glances at Han, who is glancing at him, clearly thinking the exact same thing:

_Those are famous last words, if I’ve ever heard them._

Luke grew up on a hot, desert planet where liquid water was so rare it had to be farmed. He has no cold tolerance whatsoever. He is going to want to die within forty-five minutes of landing at the new base.

But he’ll insist that he’ll be fine if they point this out, and at any rate, it won’t change anything, so there’s no point in calling attention to it. Instead, he decides to change the subject.

“Doesn’t Tatooine have a lot of trading in droids?” he asks, and Luke looks up, nodding.

“Yeah, pretty much any kind of droid. You have to deal with the Jawas, though.”

“Eh, Jawas are easy,” Han interjects, waving a hand dismissively and nearly hitting Cassian in the face. He bites his tongue, weighing his options.

Option one: go to Tatooine, buy a disused chassis, and download Kaytoo’s information on it, thus bringing his droid back. Pros: Kaytoo comes back, and there are other things on Tatooine he could find. Cons: he has to be in a ship with Han for a week. (And Chewie, but Han is the real issue.)

Option two: give up on Kaytoo, or at least on this method of getting him back, and go to Echo base as planned. Pros: he does not have to be stuck with Han for a week. Cons: he has no other idea how to get the chassis for an Imperial security droid. And then the other thing.

(He isn’t even going to think about it in so many words; it’s just an impression, just an idea.)

He has the time; or rather, they'll give him the time, seeing as how his skills are less critical to the Rebellion now that they've officially declared war; spies are more important in cold wars than open ones. Maybe it means he’ll be given some new assignment. He can't say he'd be sad to see this one go.

“I’ll go with you,” he says, with an attempt at shrugging it off. Han looks at him.

“To get a droid?” he asks, sounding a bit confused.

“A new chassis,” Cassian clarifies. “My droid was destroyed at Scarif, but I have his information backed up. I just need the chassis for a security droid.” To Luke: “D’you think they’ll have one?”

Luke shrugs. “I didn’t see one the last time I spoke with them,” he says, “but I’ve seen them before. They get security droids sometimes when they find downed Imperial ships in the sector.”

“There are probably other places you could find one, though,” Han adds, sounding thoughtful. “I mean, sure, come along, but it seems like a long way to go for a droid.”

“I _like_ my droid,” he counters, without any further explanation. Han shrugs.

“Well, you gave me a lot of money,” he says. “So, you’re always welcome on my ship.”

“I appreciate it,” he replies, fighting back the urge to roll his eyes.

.

Jyn lets the medic swear her out of standing for the medal ceremony, and apparently Cassian refused outright to accept one, but Bodhi, it seems, never considered that he might be given a medal for his performance -- both in securing the plans and in taking down the Death Star -- and so he's completely unprepared when the officer (Jyn’s tentative grasp of formal military says the patch means Major) pulls him away before the ceremony to stand with Han and Luke and Chewie.

Han looks a little impressed, and Luke is beaming, with an arm around Bodhi, no doubt reassuring him that he more than deserves this, but Bodhi just looks scared. Bodhi never wanted medals, the same way Jyn didn't and Cassian will fight anyone who tries to give him one, but…

Bodhi deserves it. It takes a lot more courage to leave what you've always known and followed blindly behind to do the right thing, than to be the child of a rebel soul like Lyra and raised by a partisan warrior like Saw. It's much harder to go from apathy to action than from one action to another.

It might be why Luke is so determined to make Bodhi understand why he deserves it -- Luke was also apathetic until the Empire burned down his home, so he needs to reach out to someone else who knows how it feels to wake up so coldly after a such a long sleep.

People like Jyn, and Cassian, and Leia, have been cold for so long that they've sort of forgotten how tough it is, when you first step out from safety and into the storm.

That's what the medals are about, she thinks. To encourage others to defect, to decide, to step up -- because _look, we lauded this one who was an Imperial pilot, this one who thought he could never hope to do anything that would help, this one who refused the call to action at first because of his own debts to pay_.

It would be meaningless to give them to lifelong rebels, because all the people in the galaxy who were born rebels are either here or dead. They need to show other people, people who are uncertain and uncomfortable and afraid of making waves -- people who are on that edge, on that precipice between acting and backing down -- that they will be appreciated in the Rebel Alliance.

It's pure politics, but it's dressed up in frills and pretty music, and it's honoring people who deserve the honor, so no one will point out the real motive.

And even though Jyn knows all the cynical reasons for the ceremony, it still makes her smile to see the princess place a Medal of Honor around Bodhi’s neck.

There's an odd sort of peace to it, a kind of rightness to all of this that makes her feel lighter than she can ever recall.

She gives him a thumbs-up, and he gives her a tremulous smile in return.


End file.
